Test matches return today after a long, long gap.
And while we eagerly wait for the umpires to call ‘Play’ on Day 1, not all cricketers have returned from the lockdown.

While England skipper, Joe Root, misses the game to attend the birth of his second kid, Dwayne Bravo, Shimron Hetmeyer and chose to skip the series after the players were handed an option by WICB.

Root misses a test for the first time since 2014, and with England most likely to opt for the Anderson-Archer-Wood trio, it will be his first time that Stuart Broad misses a test at home since 2012.

Alistair Cook had missed only 1 test in his glittering 161 match career – due to a stomach bug. He ended up playing in 159 consecutive games. Before Cook, Allan Border played 153 of his 156 matches without missing one in between.

Kapil Dev never missed a test due to injuries or fitness issues during his 131 game career. He, however, was dropped for a game once – apparently for playing a reckless shot at a crucial moment. He had played 66 tests until then, and after the break, proceeded to play another 65 tests. Nice mid-career break, you could say!

While this might be the first time that players opted out of a tour due to a pandemic, it certainly is not the first time that a Windies player has missed a game due to unusual reasons. Jimmy Adams once cut his finger with a butter knife on the flight that required him to have stitches and forced him to sit out a tour to South Africa.

Chris Lewis once shaved his head, and suffered a sunstroke on a tour to the Caribbean which forced him to miss a tour game.

Sydney Barnes, the legendary spinner, once boycotted an Ashes tour after he learnt that he would have to pay for his family’s travel expenses, while Jeff Thompson injured himself playing tennis on the rest day of a Test match causing him to miss the remainder of the game.

In recent memory, four members of the Australian team were dropped from a Test match on a tour to India after they failed to complete a homework that the coach had assigned to them.

What are some of the other unusual incidents where a player missed a test match?