Although he didn’t bat at No 4 in either of his knocks, the qualities he showed – his temperament, ability to rotate the strike and play the big shots with equal ease – suggested that he would be the ideal choice. However, the selectors chose to drop him inexplicably in order to perform a few more experiments and iterations.

They tried 12 more players at that position since then which included the likes of Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Ajinkya Rahane, Dinesh Karthik.

Moreover, the experiments continued even after they had embarked upon their World Cup journey and the likes of Rishabh Pant and Vijay Shankar were the subjects of it.

However, none of the batsmen seemed qualified enough to handle the responsibilities of this position even after a trial of around two years. Some of them did average over 40 in the limited number of opportunities they got, but their accumulations were once again boosted a lot by their unbeaten knocks, which means their average returns per innings wasn’t satisfactory at all.