New Zealand coach Gary Stead is hopeful that captain Kane Williamson will come back for the three-test-tour of England in June. Williamson is currently leading the Sunrisers Hyderabad in IPL 2022 in India.
However, the coach feels that the NZ captain will need to manage his workload to avoid recurrence of an elbow injury, which has been troubling him for quite sometime now. The 31-year-old missed home series against Bangladesh and South Africa owing to a tendon injury in his left elbow that has been troubling him over the last 18 months.
The coach said, “At the moment, Kane is just out of that role because he hasn’t been available for us. So when Kane comes back, I expect him to be captain for us again.”
In February, Williamson said he was so tired of dealing with the elbow that there were times he wanted to ‘cut it off’. He even reached out to India’s veteran cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and Australia’s Steve Smith for advice on recovering from elbow injuries.
Stead said, “There was no need to rush his return to the ‘Black Caps’. The catch-22 is, Kane comes back early, scores a hundred, and his elbow is gone again, and then we’d be in the same place.”
Although he is dying to play cricket for New Zealand, but like all of us, he needs breaks at certain times.
“I can absolutely assure you of that, but we can’t burn him out in the future. We have to be smart around those things,” the NZ coach added.
