India’s No.3 Crisis: 7 Nations Better Than Team India in Test Cricket | Dravid-Pujara legacy | The problem of number-3 is not solving …: Betting of 7 countries on this position is better than Team India

The Indian team has performed strongly in the five -match Test series against England. In all the three matches played so far in the series, Team India has been ahead of the hosts most of the time. The most important contributor to this has been our batting, which has scored a lot of runs under the difficult situations of England.

Despite this, India is lagging behind 1-2 in the series after three matches. Meanwhile, the biggest problem of the Indian team has been batting on number-3. Except for the batter of number-3 on this tour, India’s top-7 batting position is at least one half-century. The contribution of number-3 batter in Test cricket becomes important because this position has the highest number of 399 centuries in victory.

Karun Nair and Sai Sudarshan on number-3 on England tour Sai Sudarshan and Karun Nair have batted at this position for India on the tour of England. But both batter proved to be a flop and no batter has crossed the 40 figure once.

However, the problem of number-3 batter is not new to India. The average of our number-3 batter has been at number eighth in the world since the beginning of this decade i.e. from the beginning of this decade. In the last five years, we have tried 11 batsmen on this position. But in 52 matches, he has scored at an average of 30.83. In this case we are only better than Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland and West Indies.

Pujara’s 4000 runs between Karun’s two 40+ India’s No.3 Karun Nair has scored 505 runs in 9 Tests of his career. 303 runs came in a single innings. Karun, who is trying to replace Pujara, has reached 40+ only 2 times in his career. Pujara has scored 3939 Test runs in between these two 40+ scores.

Our worst average number-3 position on England tour Both Karun Nair and Sai Sudarshan, who batted at the number-3 position on the England tour, have proved to be a batter flop. Sudarshan made his Test debut in the first match of the series, but he could score zero in the first innings and 30 runs in the second innings. He was dropped from the team after just one occasion. After this, in the next two matches, Karun took responsibility for this position. But he too could score only 111 runs in four innings. In this series, the average of number-3 has been the worst 23.5 in our top-7 batter.

After Dravid, Pujara took the responsibility, but who after him? In this century, 2 best batter of Tests took responsibility of number-3 in Team India. Both these batsmen were Rahul Dravid and Cheteshwar Pujara. Apart from these two players, no one played 50 Test matches on this position. Dravid scored 10501 runs in 135 Test matches at an average of 53.30 on this position. After his retirement, Pujara took the responsibility of batting at this position and scored 6529 runs in 95 Test matches at an average of 44.41. However, since dropping Pujara, Team India has not yet found any reliable player on this position.

Weakness again exposed due to Shubman Gill going to number-4 Shubman started playing on number-3 after Pujara was excluded due to poor form. He scored 972 runs in 16 matches at an average of 37.38 at this position between July 2023 and January 2025. Gill scored three centuries in four in the last five years on this position. But after Kohli’s retirement, he moved to number-4. Due to this, this problem of the Indian team again exposed.