India fast bowler Prasidh Krishna’s return to one-day side has been a study in both promise and patience, shaped by flashes of control, the realities of modern white-ball cricket and the longer arc of a career
interrupted by injury.
The fast bowler featured in the first two ODIs of the ongoing series against New Zealand, only to be left out of the decider in Indore. He returned bowling figures of 2/60 in the first ODI in Vadodara and followed that with 1/49 before India brought back Arshdeep Singh and consigned him to the bench.
For Prasidh, the past few years have required adjustment as much as recovery. Fitness concerns pushed him to the sidelines and during this period, the 50-over game subtly but significantly changed. On his return, he found himself bowling under new rules, with two new balls and batters increasingly becoming aggressive.
“I came in, I think I started off pretty well, and then a couple of years of injury took me some time to come back,” he said before the third ODI in Indore on Sunday. “And by the time I came back, actually, the format had changed. The powerplay rules, the other ball and everything. So it’s been interesting, lots to learn.”
Those challenges were evident in the first two matches of the series, where Prasidh showed his ability to extract bounce and movement but also faced the familiar white-ball test of containment. Much of his workload comes at difficult stages of the innings, when margins for error are thin.
“Every time I come on to bowl because it’s the end of powerplay… and it’s the death,” he explained. “So it is going to be quite hard. The batsmen are going to come hard at you. And that’s when you need to be very consistent in the areas that you hit.”
Consistency is what Prasidh continues to aim for.
“I want to get a lot more consistent in the way that I go about things that I do and then get better at it,” he said. “Be the best one in the team… and keep winning more matches for the team.”
Beyond that lies the ultimate target familiar to every cricketer: winning a global tournament.
“All of us know that you want to go out to an ICC event and win that one,” Prasidh added.
