Being Dropped or Benched: What Losing Your Place Teaches About Being Passed Over

Losing to an opponent is a defeat an athlete can usually explain. Being dropped or benched is a different, quieter kind of loss: a judgment call made about you, by people who control your career, often without a clear public reason, while you are still capable and still willing to play.

Three differently shaped cases

Karun Nair was dropped from the Indian Test team after the 2018 tour of England and did not return for nearly seven years. In an interview about his eventual comeback, he said, “I was never going to give up on playing for India again.” About the years in between, he said, “It’s crazy but deep down, I knew I was good enough.” Seven years is long enough that most people would reasonably have moved on. He did not.

Suryakumar Yadav was dropped from India’s T20I squad after a poor IPL season, despite having been a key part of India’s T20 World Cup-winning squad shortly before. He described being “completely shocked.” He credited his wife’s reaction for resetting his focus: she told him to “think about why you started playing this game” and to “bring that passion back again.” It reconnected him to the reason he played at all, separate from the selection decision itself.

Sanju Samson has faced repeated in-and-out selection despite being named Player of the Tournament at a T20 World Cup. This has drawn public criticism from senior figures like Ajinkya Rahane, who said he hoped “there has been some communication” with Samson about the decision. Rahane’s comment names the part of this that is unfair and worth acknowledging. Being dropped without a clear explanation is harder to accept than being dropped for a stated, specific reason, and athletes are regularly asked to handle that ambiguity.

What this activity requires

Being benched or dropped requires continuing to train seriously for a place that may not come back. It means offering no visible sign of resentment to the team or the selectors who made the decision, because visible resentment is itself often used as a reason to keep someone out longer. It also requires, as Suryakumar’s case shows, deliberately reconnecting to a reason for doing the work that has nothing to do with whether someone else currently rates you.

The real-world equivalent

This is the exact shape of being passed over for a promotion, left off a project team or excluded from a decision without a clear explanation. Most professionals face a version of this at least once. The instinct to demand an explanation or visibly disengage is the same instinct an athlete has to manage in public, in front of teammates and cameras, with much less privacy to process it. Losing and Coming Back and The Mental Side of the Dual Journey cover what helps in the weeks after a setback like this.