Towards the end of his reign at Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson struggled to find an all-action midfielder of his ideals. Paul Scholes had aged; Owen Hargreaves was locked on the surgeon’s table. A strategist rather than a tactician, he bypassed the flaw by stacking his side with a bunch of versatile forwards who dropped to the midfield like Wayne Rooney or Javier Hernandez, tracked and won the ball and functioned as auxiliary midfielder. He bowed out with a revenge and league crown.

The legendary manager is one of India head coach Gautam Gambhir’s idols, and he is navigating a permutational hurdle by adapting to cricket a similar sum-of-the-parts-bigger-than-the-whole theory. He could not get a fully-fit Hardik Pandya , the perfect cricketer trapped in an imperfect body. He couldn’t discover or manufacture one either. So he turned to three different men who could by and large perform one man’s role.…