Ganguly diagnosed with hip ailment

The injury-besieged Indian team received another piece of bad news today when Sourav Ganguly was diagnosed with "intra-articular pathology of the right hip joint" casting a doubt over his further participation in the series. Ganguly pulled out of the Nagpur Test on the morning the match complaining of groin pain.

A media release issued by the team management said that medical investigations - bone-scan, MRI and diagnostic ultrasound - "revealed intra-articular pathology of the right hip joint noted by increased synovial fluid accumulation," which translates in layman's terms to an injury or inflammation of the hip joint leading to an increase in the lubricating fluid around it. And it can cause pain to radiate down to the thigh and even to the knee.

"The scan report this morning has revealed that there is bit of an effusion, there is a bit of fluid in the hip joint," Andrew Leipus, the team physiotherapist, explained when speaking to reporters after the third day's play. "That is where he is getting those symptoms from. The pain stretches down from the hip joint to the leg. The bone scan did not reveal anything, which was good for us. We got to know about this through the MRI."

The injury means that Ganguly is a doubt for the fourth Test, which starts on November 3 in Mumbai, but Leipus was optimistic that Ganguly would recover in time for that match: "We are going to check it again tomorrow and the inflammation should have settled down, so if the results are positive then he should be fine for Mumbai. We'd like to give [him] a light workload in a couple of days. And he should be running around soon."