Can India find a way to fit in Kuldeep Yadav in remaining two games?

New Delhi, Oct 20 (PTI) India's head coach Gautam Gambhir has always been unwavering in his cricketing conviction, and picking multi-skilled players to shore up the batting till number eight is primary among them.

So it becomes doubly difficult for a Kuldeep Yadav, with 181 wickets from 113 games, to fit in the head coach's scheme of things at the moment.

Only three 50-over games in Australia isn't big enough sample size to reach a definitive conclusion on whether Gambhir's punt (not Shubman Gill's) of playing three all-rounders is the way to go forward on those tracks, which offer both bounce and seam movement.

With India scoring only 136 in a game featuring multiple rain stoppages, it would also be unfair to judge the bowling unit, which got very little runs to defend.

But if India play three all-rounders in Nitish Kumar Reddy, Axar Patel and Washington Sundar, with the last two being specialist finger-spinners, it becomes virtually impossible to fit in the man from Kanpur, who is now 10th in the list of all-time wicket-takers for the country in 50-over cricket.

There is every possibility that India might go into the second ODI in Adelaide on Thursday (October 23) with an unchanged XI but there will remain a question mark whether that is the best combination for the visitors.

This pattern of making Kuldeep the disposable guy isn't something that is only prevalent in the Gambhir era. It has happened when Ravi Shastri has been the head coach and repeated when Rahul Dravid was in charge.

Formats changed, but the pattern remained identical.

And none other than Ravichandran Ashwin feels that this is something that can actually hurt Kuldeep's psyche where self doubts start to invariably creep in.

"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 says if there is a seam bowling all-rounder in Reddy, then there is no reason not to include Kuldeep in the set-up.

"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.

Since Kuldeep's debut in 2017, India have played six ODIs Down Under (7 if Perth ODI on Sunday is also counted), and the wily spinner has featured in two of them during the 2018-19 series, grabbing 2 for 54 off 10 overs in one of the games.

While batting is a primary reason that Washington Sundar has been picked, being a finger spinner means that over-spin on the deliveries (in simple terms forward rotation) will help him extract more bounce.

But Washington is a restrictive bowler and not the wicket-taking one. He believes in choking the run-flow and then get wickets.

On the other hand, Kuldeep being a left-arm wrist spinner is naturally a difficult proposition when it comes to batters reading him from the hand. Also with flight and dip being his main weapons, he is always on the attack.

But wrist spinners do come with their baggage of issues and playing Kuldeep at Adelaide is fraught with risks, one of them being the smaller side boundaries where he can be pulled or cut with ease.

The choices aren't easy but Gambhir and Shubman Gill will have to decide what they want to opt for -- a safer option with limited rewards like Washington or a high-risk high-reward player like Kuldeep. PTI KHS KHS AH AH AH