Gautam Gambhir, the head coach of India, has always been steadfast in his belief in cricket, and he prioritizes selecting players with a variety of skills to support the batting until number eight.
As a result, Kuldeep Yadav, who has taken 181 wickets in 113 games, finds it even harder to fit into the head coach’s current plan.
The sample size of just three 50-over matches in Australia is insufficient to draw firm conclusions about whether Gambhir’s (not Shubman Gill’s) gamble of using three all-rounders is the best course of action on those wickets, which provide both bounce and seam movement.
With India scoring only 136 in a game including many rain stoppages, it would also be unfair to condemn the bowling unit, which had little runs to defend.
However, it would be nearly impossible to squeeze in the Kanpur native, who now ranks 10th in the nation’s all-time wicket-takers in 50-over cricket, if India were to field three all-rounders—Nitish Kumar Reddy, Axar Patel, and Washington Sundar—the latter two of whom are skilled finger-spinners.
There is a chance that India may start the second One-Day International in Adelaide on Thursday, October 23, with the same lineup, but it will be unclear if it is the optimum lineup for the visitors.
This trend of treating Kuldeep as a throwaway commodity is not unique to the Gambhir period. It occurred under the tenure of Ravi Shastri as head coach and again during Rahul Dravid’s tenure.
The pattern was the same, but the formats were different. And according to Ravichandran Ashwin, this is something that might seriously harm Kuldeep’s mental health, since self-doubt always begins to surface.
“Am I the reason team will lose? Kuldeep might think, I am bowling so well, even after that I am not playing, then am I the problem in this team? It is a crushing feeling and not everyone can handle it. Lot of people lose courage to fight,” Ashwin said on his Hindi YouTube channel after India lost the rain-curtailed opening game by seven wickets.
Ashwin feels that there is no justification for leaving Kuldeep out of the lineup if Reddy is a seam bowling all-rounder is included.
“Having Nitish in the side, if you can’t play your best spinner, I don’t know,” said Ashwin, who doesn’t subscribe to the theory that No. 8 batter will act as a protection to the top-order.
India has played six ODIs in Australia since Kuldeep’s debut in 2017 (seven if the Perth ODI on Sunday is included). The sly spinner has appeared in two of these matches during the 2018–19 series, taking 2 for 54 off 10 overs in one of them.
Washington Sundar was selected mostly for his hitting ability, but as a finger spinner, he will be able to extract more bounce from his deliveries by adding over-spin (or, to put it simply, forward rotation).
However, Washington is not a wicket-taking bowler; rather, he is a restricted one. He thinks that the best way to get wickets is to stop the flow of runs.
However, because Kuldeep is a left-arm wrist spinner, it is inherently challenging for hitters to read him from the hand. He is always attacking because his primary weapons are flight and dip.
However, wrist spinners do have issues, and playing Kuldeep at Adelaide is risky because of the narrower side boundaries, which make it easy to pull or cut him.
Although the decisions are difficult, Gambhir and Shubman Gill must choose between a high-risk, high-reward talent like Kuldeep and a safer alternative with less benefits, like Washington.
