For him, this wasn’t just a bad day in the office. It was the logical outcome of a confused selection philosophy that is loading the team with all-rounders and starving it of specialists in a format built on roles and clarity.

“Test cricket is a game of specialists”: Parthiv Patel

Parthiv’s central argument is brutally simple: India aren’t losing because their players aren’t trying; they are losing because the XI is structurally wrong.

“There are two things. One is the mistake of the coach. The batters and bowlers are doing their job. But the question is, are we playing the right XI? Does India need so many all-rounders in Test cricket? I believe that Test cricket is a game of specialists. You must have six batters. The best thing is you have a wicket-keeper batter who is among the best and who has an average of above 40. Then you need four bowlers and one all-rounder,” he said, dissecting the Guwahati defeat after South Africa completed a 2-0 sweep.

In other words, the problem isn’t the effort, it’s the architecture. India’s current template – with Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar, Nitish Kumar Reddy and Kuldeep Yadav all squeezed into the same XI – leaves them in a strange halfway house: not quite stacked with proper batters, not fully loaded with frontline bowlers either.

Parthiv even laid out what a more balanced framework should look like: six specialist batters, a top-quality wicketkeeper-batter, four bowlers and one genuine all-rounder. It’s a model built on depth in both disciplines rather than the illusion of depth through bits-and-pieces roles.

IPL mindset, Test consequences

The most stinging part of his assessment was the suggestion that IPL thinking has quietly bled into India’s red-ball selection.

“Actually, we are blessed that we can call both Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar all-rounders because they bat and bowl well. Then you have Kuldeep, who is a good wrist-spinner and then two quality pacers. If it is a green wicket, then play an extra pacer. But that extra all-rounder, we have seen the value of a player increasing, and we have seen the difference by impact players come in the IPL. We are not playing with a proper batter or a proper bowler. I am not picking on Nitish Kumar Reddy, but I think this is important for India to change their thinking,” said Parthiv Patel.

That last line is crucial. Parthiv isn’t taking a swing at Reddy personally but at the broader idea that you can patch over structural issues with multi-skill cricketers and call it flexibility.

In Guwahati, India ended up with a side that looked long on paper but short on both ends in practice: the batting crumbled twice, and the bowling attack, outside of isolated spells, never exerted sustained control as South Africa piled up 489 and 260/5 to set a target of 549.