March 7, 2024, Dharamsala. As India walked off the field having bowled England out for 218, two of their spinners fought over the ball. Kuldeep Yadav insisted that R Ashwin, who had taken a four-wicket haul in his 100th Test match, should keep it. Ashwin was having none of it. He knew this ball belonged to Kuldeep and no one else.
Kuldeep had taken five of the first six wickets on a day-one pitch with minimal help for the spinners. He hadn't seemed to need any help. He had beaten one top-order batter after another with his hypnotic flight and frequently made them misjudge line and length. Perhaps his most emblematic wicket was of Ollie Pope, beaten by drift, beaten by dip, beaten on the outside edge and stumped while stranded halfway down the pitch.
That playful tussle over the match ball felt like a passing of the baton. We didn't know it then, but Ashwin would retire by the end of the year. And for Kuldeep, that series against England seemed like a coming of age. He came into India's XI after they lost the first Test in Hyderabad, and played a key role in turning the series around, taking 19 wickets in four Tests at an average of 20.15.
Kuldeep seemed to have become the bowler India had envisioned when he first played Test cricket in 2017: a master of deception capable of taking the pitch out of the equation and of taking wickets anywhere in the world. With a tour of Australia looming later that year, the possibilities seemed endless.
Unfortunately for India and Kuldeep, those possibilities included a sports hernia that required him to undergo surgery and miss the Australia tour.
And since his return to action, everything has changed - new coaching staff, new captain, and possibly a different Kuldeep as well - to the extent that it feels impossible to put a finger on what changed first.
Has the new management not valued Kuldeep as much as the previous one did, and given him fewer opportunities across formats? Has the new captain been less keen on giving Kuldeep the ball and less keen on keeping him in the attack for long spells than previous captains? Has something changed in Kuldeep's bowling, and made him a less potent threat to batters?
And what came first?
We can't attempt to answer these questions without access to the behind-the-scenes workings of India's dressing room. We can, however, try and make sense of what has happened on the field over the last year-and-a-half of Kuldeep's career.
During that 2023-24 series against England, Kuldeep hit heights that wristspinners seldom do. He turned the ball around 0.4 degrees more on average than the other spinners on both sides, and he was more accurate, landing the ball in the good-length area (4-6m from the stumps) marginally more often.
Since then, Kuldeep's raw numbers for turn and accuracy have fluctuated. He turned the ball less than the combined average of his spin-bowling colleagues in two of India's last four home series, but more worrying is the fact that his 4-6m percentage has been worse than that of the other spinners in all four series - against New Zealand in 2024-25, against West Indies and South Africa in 2025-26, and the one-off Test against Afghanistan in June. In the Afghanistan Test, he landed just under 55% of his deliveries in the 4-6m zone as against the 63% achieved by the other spinners on both sides.
We don't have ball-tracking data for last week's Galle Test against Sri Lanka, but Kuldeep's control certainly looked less exacting than that of his fingerspin colleagues Manav Suthar and Ravindra Jadeja. This shouldn't necessarily mean there are any issues with Kuldeep's bowling. Wristspinners tend to be less accurate than fingerspinners as a rule, and Suthar and Jadeja are exceptionally accurate even by the standards of fingerspinners.
Kuldeep, however, isn't your average wristspinner. He can turn the ball big, but his biggest threat comes from his control of length, and the way he uses his stock angle - left-arm over to the right-hand batter - and subtle changes in pace and trajectory to keep the stumps and both edges of the bat constantly in play. He accentuates his angle across the right-hand batter and into the left-hand batter with his drift, and he can beat either edge with just his stock ball, even without needing to throw in his wrong'un.
In Galle, Kuldeep settled into this sort of rhythm only once, during his first spell in the first innings when he bowled five overs, conceded 16 runs, and took the wicket of Kamindu Mendis, beating him in the air and inducing an airborne drive into the covers. Thereafter, his control of both line and length looked less than ideal, with Sri Lanka's determination to sweep him at every opportunity - even from the line of the stumps, if required - unsettling him further.
There was a point during Sri Lanka's second innings when Kuldeep went around the wicket to the left-handed Sonal Dinusha, and he eventually bowled 29 of his 66 balls in that innings from that side of the stumps. It was an interesting choice particularly to the left-hand batter, because that angle takes away almost all chance of lbw, and there was no real rough area outside the batter's leg stump for Kuldeep to work with.
But Kuldeep looked noticeably sharper from that angle, with the TV broadcast at one point showing he was achieving around 6 degrees of turn from there as opposed to around 4.5 degrees from over the wicket. He seemed to be getting through his action in a snappier way too, and to be able to put more of his body into the ball.
"For me, he has always been a match-winner, and he definitely is in the scheme of things, but we will again decide on the combination once [we know the conditions]" Sairaj Bahutule on Kuldeep Yadav
If you compare footage of Kuldeep's bowling in Galle and his bowling in the Dharamsala Test against England, you might see why this was the case. While bowling from over the wicket in Dharamsala, Kuldeep's upper body seemed perfectly aligned with his target - the batter and the stumps - with his front arm tucking close to his hip at delivery and finishing behind him in his follow-through. When he bowled from over the wicket in Galle, more of the No. 23 on his back was visible through his action, which looked a lot more open-chested and ended with his body falling away to the right-hand batter's leg side.
Kuldeep was still falling away when he went around the wicket, but because of the angle he was now bowling from, he was falling away towards his target.
Now these observations come from a comparison of highlights clips rather than a systematic study of hours of footage. And they are not backed by any expertise in bowling biomechanics. But they point towards a possible issue in Kuldeep's alignment at the crease, which could be compromising his ability to put revs on the ball as well as his ability to land the ball where he wants to.
If such an issue does exist, it's hard to say when it first crept in. Has Kuldeep still not fully regained enough rhythm post-surgery - a sports hernia, remember, results from repeated twisting motions of the hip, which are an occupational hazard of spin bowling - to put his body into his action like he used to?
Or is it a result of a lack of playing time? Kuldeep has played in India's last two Tests, but he's missed a lot of white-ball cricket in between: he hasn't been a part of their T20I squad, and he's only played one of their last six ODIs. Between June 8 and August 15, Kuldeep only bowled ten overs in international cricket, 46.5 overs for Yorkshire in the Metro Bank One-Day Cup, and 18 overs in the Indians' tour game against an SLC XI, where he did not bowl in the second innings.
That isn't a lot of overs, and even the Galle Test gave Kuldeep little chance of bowling his way into rhythm. Where Suthar bowled 45.2 overs across the two innings and Jadeja 44, Kuldeep only bowled 25. And apart from his first spell in the first innings, he never got to bowl with the ball still hard and new, which left him at a significant disadvantage on what was a distinctly new-ball pitch.
This isn't unusual for someone in a three-man spin attack, and Shubman Gill was perfectly entitled to use a lot more of Suthar and Jadeja than Kuldeep, given how much control and threat the two fingerspinners exerted. As much as India might want to give Kuldeep extended spells and help him find his best rhythm, cricket teams exist to win matches first and foremost, with all other considerations secondary.
And if you were to zoom right out, it isn't even evident that Kuldeep is under pressure going into the second Test in Colombo. At the end of the 2023-24 home series against England, he had taken 53 wickets in 12 Test matches at an average of 21.05. Since then, he has taken 27 wickets in seven Tests at 27.88. Of the three spinners who have played at least five Tests for India in this period, he has the best strike rate (43.9) and the second-best average behind Washington Sundar (27.00).
Those are fine numbers for a bowler who hasn't always looked at his best through this period, and has spent long periods on the bench, including all five Tests on last year's tour of England. On that tour, Kuldeep lost out to a combination of allrounders who stretched India's batting depth. Now, India could leave Kuldeep out for the same reason at the SSC, if they believe the offspin-bowling allrounder Saransh Jain offers a better combination of utility with bat and ball than Kuldeep if Suthar and Jadeja are going to continue bowling the bulk of the spinners' overs.
That sort of reasoning is perfectly valid even if it's defensive-minded, and even if it frustrates a lot of fans as it has done on many occasions through Gautam Gambhir's tenure as head coach.
"It all depends on the conditions," India spin-bowling coach Sairaj Bahutule said when asked about this selection debate on Friday, two days out from the second Test. "What is the need at that particular time, different conditions, what would be the right combination. Is fast bowling an option, is adding a spinner an option?
"And Kuldeep, for me he has been a fabulous bowler over the years. Yes, the wickets sometimes are slow, and sometimes the ball operates differently for wristspinners on certain surfaces. But for me he has always been a match-winner, and he definitely is in the scheme of things, but we will again decide on the combination once [we know the conditions]."
Apart from batting ability, one advantage Jain has over Kuldeep is that he is a fingerspinner. All three India spinners struggled for penetration when the Kookaburra ball became older and softer in Galle, and Bahutule, who played two Tests and eight ODIs as a legspinner, suggested that the softer ball is a particularly difficult thing for wristspinners to deal with.
"All the spinners [struggled with the softer ball], to be very honest," Bahutule said. "[For] fingerspinners it becomes easier. For a legspinner it is that much harder because of the softness of the ball, the seam just goes down, and the wrist is used.
"Fingerspinners, you can manipulate the fingers and bowl the speeds you want to bowl. So it is definitely a tough proposition for a wristspinner, but I don't think one game decides on the way he's been performing and the way he's approaching his cricket. He has been a match-winner for India."
India have reasonable grounds for leaving Kuldeep out in Colombo, but if that choice does come to pass, it will leave Kuldeep in a tricky position at a tricky time in his career. He is the rarest of talents, an attacking wristspinner with an abundance of wicket-taking guile and far superior control to most bowlers of his kind. He is 31, an age when Test-match spinners tend to come into their own. He should be playing a lot of cricket and taking a lot of wickets, and he would probably be doing both those things if he hadn't been playing for a country with India's abundance of spin-bowling resources.
Even with that luxury, India must know that Kuldeep is a unique weapon that can win them matches in conditions where few other spinners can make an impact. Even if there are legitimate grounds for not playing him in every match, they must find ways to maintain his bowling volumes and help him stay in rhythm. Above all else, they must make sure he knows he is valued. He is too good a cricketer to fade away going into what should be his best years.