What Karun Nair's Test ledger says about those 9,537 first-class runs

The view going round is that Karun Nair is the great wasted talent of Indian batting, a first-class legend never given his due. His Test ledger reads differently: a batting average of 41.36 across ten Tests, held up almost entirely by one innings of 303.

The triple hundred and the three Tests after it

That innings arrived on 16 December 2016 against England, two Tests into his career, after two low scores. It bought him a series against Australia the following March, where four innings produced nothing of note, and then came nothing at all from March 2017 until a recall against England in June 2025.

Four innings with a top score of 26 is a thin basis for dropping anyone, and that is the strongest card the underused argument holds.

Did the 2025 recall change anything?

It gave him the longer look the first spell never did, and the numbers from it are the awkward part of the legend. Across four Tests in England he averaged 25.63 with the bat, when a top-seven batter in men's Tests over the last two years averages 32.89.

He passed fifty once, in the last of those Tests, and the rest were starts in the twenties and thirties that never grew into the long innings his domestic record promises, with the runs coming slowly as well. Put another way, he was getting in and getting out, and a top-seven batter in that side is expected to turn more of those starts into proper innings.

So was he underused?

India are a hard side to break into, second in our men's Test ratings with a 66% chance of beating an average side. A middle-order place in that team has to be held with Test runs, and a summer in England was a fair length of rope to show them.

The first-class record is a proper achievement, and the triple hundred will outlive everyone's memory of this argument. But the selectors have now read the other ledger twice, and the second reading came back below par for the position.

On his own numbers he is a legend of first-class cricket. The Test ledger is the one selectors keep, and they closed it fairly.