Former India opener Wasim Jaffer made a shocking claim about Jasprit Bumrah, saying that the Mumbai Indians bowler may just have played with a stress fracture during the recently concluded Australia series.

The news of Jasprit Bumrah’s injury has come at an inopportune time for Team India, considering the T20 World Cup in Australia is just about two weeks away.

Jasprit Bumrah has been the best death bowler in the world for some years and with some distance, his unavailability from the premier competition will be a huge blow to captain Rohit Sharma and head coach Rahul Dravid.

The Indian cricket team is heavily dependent on Jasprit Bumrah because his unorthodox action has remained a tough nut to crack in any form of cricket.

With Bhuvneshwar Kumar struggling with form, Jasprit Bumrah’s injury could prove to be a double blow to India and might just put too much pressure on the likes of Arshdeep Singh who hasn’t played much international cricket and is new in the Indian set-up.

“The stress fracture might have been there already; not to that extent, but it probably got worse after him playing a couple of games under that pressure. They kind of jumped the gun too early or made him play those games a little early,” Wasim Jaffer told ESPN Cricinfo.

“I just feel that probably in hindsight, I would say whether they have rushed him into playing against Australia, if at all I can say that. He might have taken a bit more time and probably got ready for the World Cup. I don’t know the seriousness of the injury but that’s what I feel, whether they kind of pushed him too early to play and then obviously, it reoccurred,” Wasim Jaffer opined.

Meanwhile, Jasprit Bumrah spoke at length with senior cricket journalist Jamie Alter where he discussed his struggles to become a cricketer and the sacrifices his mother made to make him what he’s today.

“No, I was not always like this. In fact, when I started playing cricket it was the other way around. I was a little too aggressive, always on the go, always sitting on the edge… I could get angry really quickly. But then I realized that moving further if my emotions are not kept in check, then there’s going to be a lot of variation in my results,” Jasprit Bumrah said in an interview with GQ India.

“I quickly understood that if this was the game that I always wanted to excel in, I needed to figure out how to control my emotions. Stability really helps. I learned that on the go; obviously you learn from experiences, you make mistakes. I chose to look at these experiences and then asked myself how I could get the best out of these situations,” Jasprit Bumrah added.

“If it’s been a bad day, I switch off for a while. If my mind starts to wander, I divert it to something else. Then I come back and I analyse. Good day or bad, I analyse it and tell myself to remember what produced results. I depend on my own evaluation, but when I don’t have answers then I look to people I trust and believe in. Then I go to the coaches and seek advice. But after that, I filter the noise out, because at the end of the day I understand my game better than anyone else. I’ve made a career on my own,” he elaborated.

“My mother had to start working. We had seen ups, and then one day we were back to zero. So now, when we are back to another high, we stay stable because we have seen that low. We know that we cannot go ­crazy. That period has taught us so much. My mother has done so much for us, and we cannot ever repay her. We’ve bonded as a family because of what we’ve gone through and we’re very grateful for what we’ve received. We know how the world changes when things don’t go well. That’s why today we’re respectful of the good times and remain humble,” Jasprit Bumrah revealed.

“My mother was never firm in saying to me, ‘This is what you have to do’, but she did want me to have a career that would give me security. But that’s about it. She did not force anything on me, never told me I had to become a doctor or ­engineer,” he says. “In fact, it would have been difficult for her to see me as a doctor or engineer because I was always playing cricket. She must have looked at me and wondered ‘What will he do?’ Yet one thing my mother was adamant about since she was a school principal, was that I learn the English language,” Jasprit Bumrah concluded.