For the first time, the Serious Injury Replacement Rule has been implemented. The player has been replaced in the middle of the match. This rule was implemented in the semi-finals of the Duleep Trophy. Saurabh Navale came as a replacement for Harvik Desai.

The BCCI has implemented the Serious Injury Replacement Rule in Indian Domestic First Class Cricket. Its first case also came to light, when a player was replaced in the semi-final match of the Duleep Trophy 2025. The International Cricket Council i.e. ICC had asked all the Full Member Nations to trial the Serious Injury Replacement Rule. The BCCI implemented it first and we got to see the first incident after a few days.

In fact, a semi-final match of the Duleep Trophy 2025 was played between West Zone and Central Zone. In this match, West Zone wicketkeeper batsman Harvik Desai was injured. Due to a quadriceps injury, Harvik Desai could not bat further and Saurabh Navale also did wicketkeeping in his place. Saurabh Nawale later had to bat as an injury replacement in place of Harvik Desai. However, neither Harvik nor Saurabh Nawale could perform in the first innings.

The West Zone team could not even reach the final, because West Zone had scored 438 runs in the first innings and Central Zone had scored 600 runs without any player scoring a century. The Central Zone team reached the final on the basis of scoring more in the first innings. Saurabh Nawale, who came as a serious injury replacement, scored 9 runs in 31 balls, while Harvik had scored one run in 4 balls in the first innings.

There was a demand for serious injury replacement for a long time, because many times if a player gets a serious injury, he is not able to play in the match further, which is also taken advantage of by the other team many times. To avoid this, serious injury replacement is being started, whose trial is currently going on at the domestic level. In the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, we saw that Rishabh Pant got injured in one match and Chris Woakes in another match, but their injury replacements were not available, due to which both the teams had to suffer losses.