The No. 3 Who Sat in the Empty Seat: India's Flexible Batting Order and Its Unrecorded Cost

In a Kolkata newsroom on a July evening in 2026, I watched a final that none of my senior colleagues at the paper had been sent to cover. The room was half empty, England Women were subsiding to 228 for 7 on the screen, and my phone was filling with photographs from the men's tour of Sri Lanka. That night India went from 191 for 3 to a nine-run defeat. I wrote 1,400 words nobody had commissioned, and within four days ninety thousand people had read them. Since that evening I have kept one habit: I sit in an empty stand three hours before the cricket begins, because the real story is usually found in the seat where nobody sat.

The argument now filling the media about India's T20 batting order — sending Sooryavanshi in at No. 3 in the second T20 against New Zealand, then restoring him to the opening slot — reminds me of that empty seat. Because the numbers nobody typed up are the actual ground beneath this debate.

Context: when an injury writes your strategy

Begin with the fact that was never called strategy. The No. 3 slot was vacant because of Ishan Kishan's groin injury — the experiment was not chosen, it arrived under compulsion. The team management declined to disturb the Samson–Abhishek pairing and pushed the least experienced batter up to No. 3. That is a least-disruption default, not a plan.

Now look at the sample that is actually the strongest piece of evidence in this argument. Kishan at No. 3 has averaged 35.9 with a strike rate of 171.2 across 28 matches — an established, reliable international No. 3 profile. As an opener he has only five matches, but his strike rate there is 193.4. The average is nearly identical (35.2), the pace higher. Five matches is a small sample, so it cannot be treated as doctrine — but the direction is clear.

Samson at the top has 27 matches, an average of 30.1 and a strike rate of 177.6. Abhishek Sharma is his powerplay partner in the record stand that is the entry point to this whole debate. And Tilak Varma? At No. 5 he has 17 matches, an average of 38.7 and a strike rate of 145 — an anchor-finisher profile. At No. 3, across seven matches, his average falls to 16.4 and his strike rate to 108.5 — a swing of roughly 36 points. That statistic quietly says something the noise has buried: flexibility is not a universal principle but a question of mapping roles player by player.

Core: three former internationals and one unfinished number

Wasim Jaffer, Pravin Amre and Virender Sehwag are speaking in favour of a flexible order, and Sunil Raman is speaking on the same side — but with a condition: the senior player should absorb the cost of change, not the youngster. What is being described as consensus is in fact a dignified split on implementation. Sehwag's argument is direct — a man who has already played 25 or 30 matches can shift positions for an innings or two. But when we apply the same logic to a 20- or 21-year-old opener who is still building his international identity, we strip him of the only stability he has.

Here I will say something from 48 years at the desk that never appears in a data column. In T20 the No. 3 slot is a different examination for a young opener — the new ball has been scuffed, movement is reduced, but spin and shifting tempo demand a separate craft. A batter whose game is built on hitting through the air arrives in the fifth over and drifts away from his natural rhythm. Sooryavanshi looking out of sorts at No. 3 is one innings — not a trend but an observation. And it cannot become a trend, because he was never given the chance to make it one. We are passing judgement on a man who was trialled once, while using the 28-match No. 3 experience of our most versatile batter — Kishan — only because we had to.

There is a statistical trap that needs naming. Samson at No. 3 has played three matches and averages nine. That figure cannot be used to prove he cannot bat at three, because three matches are far too small for any conclusion. But it stops there. Raman's argument is built not from data but from culture — senior players share the discomfort. And that argument, despite sitting outside the data, is the only one that offers a clear moral axis.

One date in my notebook from this series will not be found on any scorecard. I sat through a practice session before the second T20 and watched Sooryavanshi playing at the nets against the new ball exactly the shots he plays in the powerplay — while the No. 3 role demands a different beginning. An opener's technique is built for the pace of the new ball, and reshaping that technique for the post-third-over game is a training project, not a match-day decision.

Contrarian: the story nobody printed

Kishan will return from injury, and the real question then will be whether he goes back to No. 3 or to the opening slot. If the team keeps him at No. 3, that will confirm the experiment was temporary and injury-driven. If he is moved to the top and Samson is pushed to three, that will be Raman's principle in action — the senior absorbs the change. Either decision will come not from data but from a management philosophy. And that is my real worry: over four decades I have watched Indian cricket turn temporary injury solutions into permanent policy. Like that night in 2026, when the whole debate on women's cricket was hung on four overs of one match.

The second thing nobody is saying: the T20 powerplay premium keeps rising, and India has four batters who prefer to open — Abhishek, Samson, Sooryavanshi, Kishan. That is not a crisis but a luxury, and luxuries still need managing. When you field four openers in one XI, one of them must go to No. 3 — and that is the only real question. Raman answers it democratically, by asking the most junior man to pay the price. Jaffer and Amre see it through tactical flexibility. Both, to my eye, stumble in the same place: neither argument rests on the data the debate keeps citing.

Takeaway: in the margin of the scorecard

After this series one question will still be open — when will we stop weighing our youngest opener's identity on the scale of an 'experiment'? The next time the No. 3 appears on screen, I will look at it the way I looked at that empty seat in 2026 — a place defined not by the result but by the story of whoever did not sit there. Cricket does not teach us who was right. It only records which option was chosen that day. And a decision taken on the strength of three matches is not a decision but a stamp — one that may or may not be read later.