India vs England: Just-landed Hanuma Vihari keeps Karun Nair grounded

True that Vihari has been in exceptional form, he was fresh from piling 148 against South Africa A on the outskirts of Bangalore, and has been staggeringly consistently, topping the first-class average among contemporary batsmen world over (59.79 in 63 matches). By this logic, Nair has the highest Test average among contemporary Test batsmen who have played more than five Tests—62.33, though of course he has played only six Tests.

But the Vihari-for-Nair debate is less about the numbers but more about process. Here was a batsman, who the selectors thought was worthy enough to be the best middle-order back-up in the country, and stuffed him into the first squad in the first place, a batsman whose last innings against England was a triple hundred, only the third Indian to the feat. He was dropped next game, as Ajinkya Rahane returned for the series opener against Australia, Kohli reasoning that one “hundred can’t overshadow two years of consistency”.

Four failures later—which is anyway a minuscule sample-size to hand out end notes to careers–he was dropped, but him picked for the England series clearly suggested that he had restored the selectors’ faith. So if any one in the middle-order failed/got injured, Nair obviously was the first choice. Or so it seemed, even if he hadn’t made too many runs in the warm-up games (21 in three innings).

That, and his part-time off-spin, well seem the only half-plausible reasons to pick Vihari—who his supporters would argue had cracked a hundred against West Indies A in Northampton in June. Sunil Gavaskar wouldn’t buy anything of these. “There is no argument that is going to ever satisfy me,” Gavaskar observed on Sony Six, soon after Kohli announced that Vihari was set to debut.

The former India skipper further fumed: “What has Karun Nair done not to get in? I know he has not been your favourite player. You don’t want to pick him. He scores a triple hundred. You leave him out. He fails in a couple of games. You leave him out. You have brought him back in the team.” Gavaskar felt it was a classic case of the selectors wanting him, but not the team management. A clear message that the team management doesn’t event any faith in him. “It could be the selectors who have brought him back. The team management probably doesn’t want him. And that’s why they haven’t given him the opportunity to play in this game,” he said.

Another former cricketer and commentator Sanjay Manjrekar felt if Vihari had a better defensive technique, there was no harm if Kohli “bypassed protocol for quality”. But as Manjrekar implies, little suggests that Vihari possesses a tangibly superior technique to Nair. In fact, there are lot of similarities between them; both score heavily through the square, have the appetite and temperament for monstrous knocks. Even technically, they have similar glitches, like going into the drives with hard hands, that quintessential affliction to feel bat on ball, the penchant for driving on the rise and an initial tendency to play away from the body.

All of these should bring us to agreeing with Gavaskar, that the only reason Nair finds himself out of the team is because the team doesn’t want him. Whatever the rationale behind the decision, it would’ve shattered Nair’s morale no less. “He has every right to ask the team management what he has done wrong. He deserves an answer. ‘Why am I not picked?’ In the end, Vihari might banish those debates and concerns with a superlative performance on what looks the most benign of tracks this English summer. But until then Nair will be left pining, wondering why he was not picked, after spending 48 days in England.