It didn’t take long for the thread to stop at Vaibhav Sooryavanshi in the press conference. The question’s gist: “There is a lot of chatter around Vaibhav and his place in the eleven?” The reply from India’s captain Shreyas Iyer was firm, rather than dismissive. “It is not like he can walk in right now, because our openers are scoring consistently, and they have won the World Cup.”

It’s reflection of India’s glowing top-order riches that Sooryavanshi is bench-bound, or that Shubman Gill , Yashasvi Jaiswal, and Sai Sudharsan have coiled into a long queue behind him; or that the incredibly consistent KL Rahul is no longer in the selector’ scheme. Iyer and the team management wouldn’t fix a piece of furniture that is not broken. Sanju Samson, Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan have an imposing body of recent work, a post-modern approach that has won India the World Cup and multiple bilateral series, and hitting range the bowlers dread.…