Former India captain doesn't consider Hardik Pandya an all-rounder 

India were defeated in the fourth Test by England at Southampton and lost the Test series 3-1. The Indian team did give England a tough fight but failed to win crucial moments which resulted in the 60 runs loss.

A lot of former players have been critical of India's strategies and team selections. The latest one to join the list is former India legend Sunil Gavaskar. Sunny Gavaskar, who had previously questioned India's schedule and lack of practice matches before the Test series, has come down heavily on India's batting. Gavaskar slammed the Indian team management's decision of playing with five batsmen and India's over-reliance on captain Virat Kohli. Gavaskar said "When you go in with five batsmen then you are bound to be in such a situation where you rely so much only on one player, Virat Kohli to get you the big hundreds. He can't do it every time, he's human. To expect that the lower order (to score the runs) after that Kohli-Rahane partnership was broken, to get even another 60-70 runs was too much."

He added "Here I think their deficiencies were shown. Earlier I think the ball was moving around quite a bit so most opening batsmen would have struggled. But here in both these innings, I don't think that was the case."

Gavaskar also questioned Hardik Pandya's role in the Test team. Even though Pandya performed brilliantly in India's win in the third Test, he failed to perform at crunch moments otherwise. Gavaskar feels that Pandya hasn't done enough to be called an all-rounder. “You want to call Hardik Pandya an all-rounder? Whoever wants to call Pandya an all-rounder, may call! But I don't think so." he said after the fourth Test.

The Indian team has been extremely inconsistent. There have some good individual performances but they have failed to perform collectively which has resulted in their poor show against England. It will be interesting to see whether the team management sticks to the strategy of going with five batsmen or they drop Hardik Pandya and include an extra batsman in the playing XI.