Nine batters. Twenty-four Test matches, 45 innings. One combined average of 31.95. That number is supposed to represent progress. It barely clears the
average of the Indian batter often judged for batting too slow, a trait not celebrated in the modern-day cricket.
Since June 2023, when Cheteshwar Pujara walked off after the World Test Championship (WTC) Final without anyone quite registering it as a goodbye, Team India have run one of the longest, costliest auditions in the country's Test history.
The job: number three. The candidates: Shubman Gill, Sai Sudharsan, Karun Nair, Devdutt Padikkal, KL Rahul, Dhruv Jurel and Washington Sundar, among others. Their collective return, according to stats: 24 matches, 45 innings, an average of 31.95.
Set that against the version of Pujara nobody wanted anymore, the one whose powers were supposedly fading. In his own last 24 Tests, Pujara averaged 31.51, a number so close to his successors' combined 31.95 that it barely counts as an upgrade. And the manner of those runs makes the comparison worse, not better.
Even in decline, Pujara faced 81.2 deliveries per dismissal. The batters who replaced him have needed only 56.3 balls to get out, on average. India didn't just fail to find more runs than a fading Pujara. It found roughly the same number of runs, at nearly two-thirds less the cost in time and risk.
This is not a story about one bad player. It is a story about a position India has not solved since Rahul Dravid retired and Pujara took over the job full time, and about a method the team has quietly abandoned without finding anything as reliable to replace it.
The Audition List
Shubman Gill - the current captain and the future superstar of world cricket - was the closest thing to a solution, and even he could not hold the position once he had the power to leave it. Across 30 innings at number three, Gill scored 1,019 runs at an average of 37.74, comfortably the best of any trialist. But split the number by geography and the story changes.
At home, across 17 innings, Gill scored 760 runs at an average of 50.66, with three centuries and three fifties. Away, in his last stretch of innings in the role, he managed scores in the twenties and thirties with barely a fifty to show for it. When he became captain, he moved himself to number four, a void created after Virat Kohli's sudden decision to retire from the red-ball format.
Tamil Nadu batter Sai Sudharsan is India's most persisted-with option and the one still auditioning. Through seven Tests he has scored 383 runs at an average of 31.91, with three fifties and no century. His most instructive failure came on his debut tour in England last year, where the left-handed batter scored 140 runs across six innings at an average of 23.33, despite posting the second-best control percentage of any Indian batter on that tour. He was not missing the ball. He was getting himself out.
Senior batter Karun Nair, recalled eight years after his last Test cap, lasted four innings at the position before being dropped again, with scores of 31, 26, 40 and 14 on the challenging England tour.
Nair's statemate Devdutt Padikkal, thrown in at Perth (on the tour of Australia in 2024-25) after a Gill injury, made 0 and 25 in his only real audition and has managed just 25 runs across two Tests at the position. Dhruv Jurel and Washington Sundar remain fringe options, tried more out of necessity than conviction.
A Structural Problem, Not a Selection Problem
The numbers get worse the further back you zoom. Since January 2020, India's number-three batters have averaged just 30 in Test cricket, worse than every major Test side barring Ireland, Zimbabwe and West Indies. Twelve different players have been tried in the role in that period, tied with South Africa for the most of any team in world cricket (amongst Test playing nations). This did not begin the day Pujara left. It has been building for years, and his presence simply delayed the reckoning.
Pujara, for context, scored 6,529 runs at number three, second only to Dravid's 10,501 in India's Test history. From 2010 to 2023, he was dismissed once every 98.3 balls, the best survival rate of any Indian batter with 5,000-plus Test runs across that period, ahead of Kohli and Rahane.
The right-handed batter from Rajkot was not just a run-scorer. He was a method, one that let the batters after him play with freedom. His average partnership with Rishabh Pant, batting at the opposite end of the risk spectrum, was 67.60, a pairing that only worked because one of them refused to get out.
Two Different Games
The style shift explains why the numbers have not recovered. Pujara's game was built for survival first, runs second, a method that traveled because it did not depend on conditions, just on time and discipline.
His signature innings came away from home: Johannesburg, the 2018-19 and 2020-21 tours of Australia, England. Everyone who has replaced him, by contrast, is a fluent, high-class white-ball player first and a red-ball specialist second.
Gill, Sudharsan, Padikkal and Nair all built their games in an era shaped by the IPL, and it shows in the results. Every single century scored at number three since Pujara left has come at home. Not one has come away.
The broader batting numbers back this up. India's top-seven home average in the current coaching era sits at 31.91, the second-worst of any era since the Greg Chappell years, when it bottomed out at 30.37.
Compare that to the Rohit-Dravid era's 41.37, or the Gary Kirsten era's 52.68. The results have followed the numbers down: home series losses to New Zealand and South Africa, and the end of a decade-long stranglehold over Australia in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, all arriving in the same window as the number-three chaos.
The Uncomfortable Question
India built an entire era of Test dominance on batters who could bat time, not just strike the ball well. The search for Pujara's replacement has instead thrown up a queue of batters who look the part in patches and disappear in others, none of them built for the specific job Pujara did for over a decade: absorbing pressure so everyone batting after him did not have to.
The fact gets vindicated by the comments his opponents lavished upon him due to his grinding knocks. Australian cricketers and media often viewed a 'stubborn' Pujara as a 'thorn in their side' and someone they 'love to hate'.
Twenty-four Tests in, the vacancy is still open. The only question left is whether India go looking for another Pujara, or accept that the position itself has changed shape, and the runs will simply have to come from somewhere else in the order.
