Pucovski suffered his thumb injury a month ago at the back end of his stint in England but he is on track to play in their Sheffield Shield opener against Western Australia in Perth the following week.
Pucovski did return to play grade cricket in January and played six matches for his Victoria premier cricket club Melbourne. He also played one 2nd XI match for Victoria against Tasmania in March late last season.
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But there is cause for optimism within Victoria’s camp about his availability this summer after Pucovski spent the winter playing for Weybridge Cricket Club in the Surrey Championship in England. He played 18 matches for Weybridge and scored 614 runs at 55.82, including a century and four half-centuries. More importantly, he managed to play 13 consecutive weekends of cricket without interruption, which is something he has scarcely managed to do in Australia for his club side Melbourne, let alone for Victoria.
There is hope he can play close to a full summer for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield, and potentially some Marsh Cup cricket, but it is understood that Australia’s national selectors would like to see him play without interruption for at least one full domestic campaign, if not two, before he is considered to return to international cricket.
Since making his debut for Victoria in February 2017, Pucovski has not managed to play a full domestic season. The closest he has come was the 2019-20 season where he played the first half of the summer for Victoria, four List A and six Shield matches, before taking an indefinite break in December of that summer and not returning until the 2020-21 season.
Pucovski first took a break from professional cricket, unrelated to injury, following his first Shield double-century in October 2018 and then took another break after being called up to the Australia Test squad in February later that summer for a two-Test series against Sri Lanka. In November 2019, he made himself unavailable for Test selection after playing for Australia A.
In October 2021, he was concussed while batting in the nets. In February 2022, on return from that concussion, he suffered concussion-like symptoms in the warm-up during a Shield game against South Australia and required a break from playing but was later cleared of formal concussion from that incident.
After a relatively smooth pre-season last year, which included a trip to the MRF Academy in India for a training camp, he managed only two Marsh Cup games and two Shield games at the start of last summer before taking another break from the game.
Alex Malcolm is an Associate Editor at ESPNcricinfo
Source: ESPN Crickinfo