Why dropping Kuldeep Yadav is insensible, insensitive, and lacks vision

Kuldeep’s plight shows the state in which the game is in India. For all the solid bench strength touted time and again, with some saying that India can field two simultaneous teams of high quality, the ICC trophy cabinet is vacant for a decade as the resources at hand are not utlilised in optimum fashion.

What happened to Kuldeep is just a symptom of a larger malaise – the lack of direction and vision in Indian cricket. It would be interesting to see how he fares when called upon next. The Dhaka selection debacle may just push his career two steps back. He will need oodles of mental strength to bounce back from this setback, which is not of his own making.

Apart from the eight-wicket match haul and the crucial 40 in the first innings, during which he put on a crucial 92 runs for the eighth wicket with Ravichandran Ashwin, what caught the eye was the rhythm the chinaman bowler showed in the game. The Bangladesh batsmen very often had no clue about what was coming at them, either the direction of the deviation or where the ball would land.

However, the player-of-the-match performance was not enough for Kuldeep to keep his place in the next match, as the team management included Jaydev Unadkat in the eleven. The left-arm seamer, a domestic stalwart, played his only previous Test a dozen years ago in South Africa, when he went wicketless in an Indian innings defeat.

“Hard decision on Kuldeep but we know Ashwin and Axar (Patel) can find spin, and bring Jaydev in to cover all bases,” is how stand-in skipper KL Rahul put it at the toss. After the day’s play, Umesh Yadav termed the decision as a call taken by the team management.

Well, if Ashwin and Axar can get spin from the surface, a wrist-spinner would do as well, maybe extract even more purchase. The pitch at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium may have had a tinge of green at the start of the match, but the general nature of tracks in Bangladesh is well known over the years, and one won’t describe it as pace-friendly. It seemed as a ‘handing out’ of a cap as a reward for Unadkat’s perseverance.

And if one spinner had to be dropped after a good performance, maybe Axar should have been the fall guy. He is basically a ‘slightly’ inferior version of Ravindra Jadeja, and keeping the seat warm till the latter returns to full fitness.

Sunil Gavaskar, for one, wasn’t one to mince words at the selection call. “Dropping a Man of the Match, that is unbelievable. That’s the only word I can use and it’s a gentle word. I would like to use quite stronger words, but it’s unbelievable that you left out a man of the match, who got eight out of the 20 wickets,” the former India captain said on television.

At 31, Unadkat isn’t likely to get into the Indian team when the likes of Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami are available, while Kuldeep was once touted by former India head coach Ravi Shastri as the team’s No.1 spinner outside Asia.

A useful weapon

Kuldeep, along with leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal, changed the dynamic of white-ball cricket a few years ago, even in conditions which hardly had anything for tweakers, before going off the boil. But at 27, his best days should still be ahead of him, if handled properly.

Looking at the bigger picture, with India’s qualification for the World Test Championship final resting on the upcoming four-Test home series against Australia, one would have thought that a fit and firing Kuldeep would have been a key weapon, especially remembering what he did in the series-decider at Dharamsala when the Aussies came calling the last time.

But thinking two steps ahead is not what the Indian think tank is known for. If given a choice about whom they will like to face in Indian conditions, the response of the Aussies would be obvious.

With the 50-over World Cup to be held in India in 10 months’ time, an on-song Kuldeep would have been a big plus. It’s a different format, no doubt, but the confidence and rhythm a player carries can often transcend the length of the game and the colour of the ball in use.