And then one day you find ten years have gone behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun.
With apologies to Roger Waters, the more you think about it, the more Time sounds like a song written about Kuldeep Yadav. Whenever India play these days, you can find him ticking away moments that make up his dull days. Then one day you realise he is pushing 32, twelve years have gone behind him, and he has actually played only 50 first-class and 136 List A matches.
The difference with Kuldeep is that he is not kicking around on a piece of ground in his home town. For then, at least he would be able to play more domestic cricket and try to present an even more pressing case to actually play international cricket. It is nigh impossible to imagine any other country being bestowed with such a unique spinner of such pedigree and them finding a way to fritter and waste him. Even Dave Mohammed played more first-class cricket than Kuldeep, who doesn't suffer from the inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies of most other left-arm wristspinner and is the leading wicket-taker among them in all formats since Cricinfo started maintaining different categories for fingerspinners and wristspinners.
For vast periods of time in his career, Kuldeep has had to live with having been born in the wrong era. At home there were Ravindra Jadeja and R Ashwin, who were both two players in one. All the Test allrounders India seemed to be churning out were spinners. Despite an average of 22.35 in Test cricket, Kuldeep could never be India's lead spinner while that duo of allrounders was there. It took massive changes in ODI cricket for Ashwin and Jadeja to be pushed out in order for Kuldeep to have a semblance of an international career.
And what a bowler Kuldeep has been. To date, he has more wickets than any spinner in ODI cricket since his debut. During this period, he has more wickets at better average and economy than both Adil Rashid and Adam Zampa, the two premier ODI spinners of this era.
Please don't mistake this for a lament on Kuldeep's behalf. No team management is obligated to be "fair" to a single player. Their first concern is to win matches, and make selections that give them the best combination to do so. That involves batting depth. That was the reason you rarely saw Kuldeep, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and Yuzvendra Chahal play together even when India were the best middle-overs bowling team in the lead-up to the 2019 World Cup. That's why Rohit Sharma and Rahul Dravid played Shardul Thakur ahead of Shami in the first half of the 2023 World Cup.
So you can grudgingly accept that on pitches that tall hit-the-deck bowlers tend to be the point of difference in the middle overs, India's cost of batting depth is Kuldeep. However, the allrounders who provide the so-called batting depth, especially in Test and ODI cricket, need to nail down at least one of the roles. India of 2023 could opt for Thakur's "batting depth" because Hardik Pandya and, in those conditions, Ravindra Jadeja were nearly full-fledged allrounders. In 2025 and 2026, though, Kuldeep has travelled all over England for two of the three formats of a staggered tour without getting a single game and a single allrounder in sight who can make those claims. The players he has been losing out to have nailed down neither a bowling spot nor a batting spot.
Despite the great form that Shumban Gill, Rishabh Pant and KL Rahul were in, India had to come back with a drawn Test series in 2025 because they kept running out of bowling. In ODIs, they have a recent example of how much middle-overs wickets can reduce the ask of their own batters. When Hardik got injured in the 2023 World Cup, India realised Thakur without Hardik left them vulnerable with the ball, so they picked a specialist batter and a specialist bowler to replace Hardik, batting depth be damned.
Increasingly bits-and-pieces allrounders are becoming a feature of only T20 cricket where you can squeeze in an over or two and use these semi-batters for set-piece match-ups. Fifty overs is a long time. Yes, allrounders add great value, but those who are not quite allrounders have only hurt India in the two longer formats.
When pushed against the wall, India's last two long-term captains, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, didn't shy away from playing four Nos. 11 in ODIs and Tests. In the absence of an established and regular captain (Gill, Rahul, Shreyas Iyer and Suryakumar Yadav at various points in the last nine months), this is essentially Gautam Gambhir's team. It took for three allrounders and for Bumrah to be injured for Gambhir's India to feel sufficiently pushed against the wall and to play four pure tailenders in the series-decider at Lord's.
It was a great occasion for the left-arm wristspinner, also now the most experienced bowler available to India. Varun Aaron and Deep Dasgupta both reported the pitch was dry and ideal for spin. An added nice little touch - not that it should sway a decision - was that we were celebrating the life of another wonderful left-arm wristspinner and arguably the greatest cricketer ever, Sir Garry Sobers.
That even in this scenario India chose rookie tall hit-the-deck bowlers ahead of Kuldeep's middle-overs threat is a matter of significant concern. It speaks of the divergence of opinion between the selectors, who keep picking Kuldeep in the squad, and the team management, who steadfastly keep refusing to play him.
To give the team management a benefit of the doubt, it is possible Kuldeep is not the same bowler as in the 2023 ODI World Cup. He was indeed deriving less turn than some of the fingerspinners in the last Test series he played at home. However, if there are issues with Kuldeep's bowling - and things can go wrong with wristspinners - and if his form in the nets tells them that he is unselectable, it is the job of the team management, which now includes a specialist spin-bowling coach to go with a full-time bowling coach, to help him set it right. If they are unable to identify the issue and set it right, they owe it to Kuldeep and to cricket to send him back to domestic cricket and work with coaches that he trusts. Anything but waste the hours in an off-hand way.