Yet, on Wednesday morning when Gill handed over the team sheet, it didn’t resonate with the team’s messaging. Jasprit Bumrah? Absent. Yadav? absent. Make it make sense because the bowling unit the visitors named didn’t have lots of it. It lacked the two things the visitors had that the hosts lacked.

A supreme fast bowler who will take the new ball in every fantasy Test XI this side of the century. And the best wrist-spinner in the game currently. Without these two potent threats, India’s bowlers, through no fault of theirs, may be doing a thankless job over the course of the Test. Prasidh Krishna, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar, and Nitish Reddy will be the six bowlers tasked with the ask of picking 20 wickets.

Or, in other words, pacer who wouldn’t be playing if all of them were fit, regular pacer, reserve pacer, spinning all-rounder who picks a wicket every 17 overs in England, reserve spinning all-rounder and reserve to Shardul Thakur. Even if it was a selection designed to maximise batting depth, they did it by removing the batter the management identified as the No. 3 (Sai Sudharsan) before the series began. They promoted the No. 6 (Karun Nair) to be the new No. 3, a position he has batted fewer than 20 times in a career spanning over 10 years. Again, make it make sense.

A young captain is allowed to make mistakes. All captains are allowed to make mistakes, especially some one who’s skippering the team for just the second time. Former Arsenal coach, Arsene Wenger, famously remarked that you pay for the education of young players with points. But the sin is not even believing in your own words. After making it clear that the stated aim was to bowl out the opposition cheaply, you don’t say: “we were very tempted to play him (Yadav), but, you know, looking at the last match, we wanted to add a bit of depth in the batting, and that’s what we have done,” at the toss.