What did India gain by playing Reddy in the West Indies series?

Nitish Kumar Reddy didn't bat in the first Test in Ahmedabad, not needed after being slotted at No. 8 in India's only innings. He bowled four wicketless overs in West Indies' first innings, and wasn't used in their second.

Promoted to No. 5 in the first innings of the second Test in Delhi, he scored 43. Then India, making West Indies follow-on, spent a cumulative 200.4 overs on the field across their two innings. Reddy didn't bowl a single over in either innings.

India view Reddy as a promising seam-bowling allrounder and are looking to develop him into a player who can give their line-ups the depth and balance they have so often struggled to achieve on past tours away from Asia. To do this, they want to give him as much exposure to Test cricket as possible, even in Indian conditions where his bowling may not be needed all that much with spinners taking on the bulk of the workload.

There is value in this strategy, but how much did Reddy gain from playing the West Indies series, and how much did India gain from his presence in their XI? Did he gain and contribute anything other than the fleeting appearances he made on the scorecard?

India head coach Gautam Gambhir certainly felt he did.

"Look, for me, it is not important how many overs [Reddy] has bowled," Gambhir said in his post-series press conference. "It is important that he is gaining experience. Gaining experience at home as well. Sometimes you learn a lot just by playing a game of cricket as well.

"It is a Test match. And we don't want to use a 23-year-old boy just on tough tours away from home. That's not going to be fair to him, that we decide to play him only in overseas tours, be it Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, or England. I think when he has done well overseas, he deserves a go in home conditions as well.

"And wherever we can get the opportunity to put him in in Indian conditions, we will continue to do that, because it is important for us to groom someone like Nitish, because you know that there are not many seam-bowling allrounders, and we have spoken for decades and decades about seam-bowling allrounders.

"So whenever we get that opportunity, we will keep grooming him. And it depends on the captain, it depends on the conditions as well, how many overs he bowls, but again, I think [just] seeing Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj bowling at home will be a great experience for him."

India captain Shubman Gill expressed similar views in his post-match interview with the host broadcaster. On Sunday, when asked about Reddy's lack of bowling, India's assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate had spoken of the difficulty teams face when they juggle the twin objectives of winning Test matches and developing players for the future.

"The priority is to win the Test match, so you're first going to get a strategy call on who's the best bowler [for a situation], and then, if it allows, you'll fit pieces in where you can buy guys time or get another batter to the wicket like we did, changed the [batting] order in the first innings, given the position we were in," ten Doeschate said. "But we're never going to sacrifice the strategy for the sake of development [...] Obviously [four] overs in this series so far and only one real chance to bat is not ideal, but the strategy will always come before the development of players."

With three allrounders in their XI, India have a certain amount of flexibility around how they line them up from Nos. 6 to 8. But there's a hierarchy too. Ravindra Jadeja is proven as a top-six batter in Test cricket around the world, and has been in red-hot form all through 2025. Washington Sundar enjoyed an excellent tour of the bat with England, scoring a maiden Test hundred to help save the fourth Test at Old Trafford alongside Jadeja and following up with a 46-ball 53 at The Oval, extending India's lead by what proved a crucial margin while batting with the tail - they eventually won that match by five runs.

India rate Reddy's batting ability highly, having seen him score a brilliant rearguard hundred against Australia at the MCG last year, in only his third Test match. But his average of 29.69 after 14 innings suggests he's still a work-in-progress.

So far in his career, he has shown he has an excellent attacking game against spin - he even demonstrated this with his reverse-sweeping and use of feet against Nathan Lyon in Australia - but has work to do against the swinging and seaming ball. During his innings in Delhi, he was troubled by Jayden Seales' late away movement, and his open-shouldered technique often left him reaching for the ball.

India believe Reddy's ceiling can be raised substantially, but for now he remains behind Jadeja and Washington, who have an edge both in terms of experience and watertight techniques, in the allrounders' batting hierarchy.

This is why India sent in Jadeja when India lost their fourth wicket in Ahmedabad: they led West Indies by only 56 at that point, and had lost Gill and KL Rahul in the space of 11 overs. Jadeja and Dhruv Jurel proceeded to put on a double-century stand, and India declared five overs after Jurel's dismissal.

In Delhi, where they batted first, India got to a position where they were able to promote Reddy up the order, and sent him in at 325 for 3. He got to face 54 balls - and would have spent longer at the crease had he not been dismissed - which, in the end, turned out to be more than Washington's series batting workload of 13 balls before India's Ahmedabad declaration.

Washington, of course, got to bowl a lot more than Reddy did, but it's normal for an offspinner to bowl more overs on Indian pitches than a medium-fast seam bowler.

There's an argument to be made that India could have used Reddy for more than just four overs across the series. They could have perhaps given him a couple of overs with the new ball in Delhi, when Jasprit Bumrah, who had bowled a spell towards the end of West Indies' first innings, didn't open the bowling after India enforced the follow-on.

They could have tried him as a partnership-breaker at some point, particularly when John Campbell and Shai Hope put on 177 for the third wicket. They could even have given him an over or two towards the end of sessions - they even brought on the highly occasional legspinner Yashasvi Jaiswal to bowl the last over of day three. But they didn't bowl Reddy at all in the second Test.

This may have felt like a waste of a resource, but it also made sense when viewed with cold objectivity. It made sense that Reddy's four overs in the series all came in the first innings in Ahmedabad, when India bowled on a day-one pitch with an even cover of grass. There was no point in either Test, thereafter, where Reddy's medium-fast bowling posed a genuine wicket threat, with Delhi's turgid surface particularly hostile to his style of bowling.

At every point as they strove to take 20 West Indies wickets, India probably felt there was a better option than Reddy for the conditions. Even though they had to bowl more than 200 overs over back-to-back innings to get those 20 wickets, they had an attack deep enough to carry the workload. This wasn't necessarily the case on their tours of Australia and England, where their prioritising of batting depth over wicket-taking depth led to Bumrah and Siraj getting overbowled.

In the home Tests, Washington and Jadeja are proper allrounders, and India had another genuine, wicket-taking spinner in Kuldeep Yadav. All three spinners could bowl long spells when needed, allowing Bumrah and Siraj to rest between spells, even if they ended up sending down their third-highest and fourth-highest match outputs in home Tests.

It brings into question the decision to enforce the follow-on. Ten Doeschate admitted at the end of day three that India had probably misread the pitch and its state of wear and tear but even if this pitch was to deteriorate far quicker than it did, it surely made sense for India to bat again and bowl when it was at a more advanced stage of breaking-up?

There was ample time left in the Test match, and little threat of rain. And the bowlers would surely have appreciated being able to put their feet up for at least a session. The decision, in the end, continued a worrying trend of selections and strategies dating back to the Australia tour that have shown this team management to treat bowlers' endurance as an unquenchable resource.

So we come to the question, then, of why play Reddy at all if his bowling, at its present level, isn't going to be of much use on most Indian pitches? Why not instead play a proper batter in Devdutt Padikkal or a third spin-bowling allrounder in Axar Patel?

The answer is that no team knows the shape that a match will take before it begins. Reddy isn't the finished article with either bat or ball, but has shown enough evidence in his Test career that he can hold his own as a batting allrounder. It's a quirk of circumstance that he finds himself playing alongside two other allrounders who presently merit batting above him and, particularly in Indian conditions, bowling more overs than him.

And because India have Jadeja and Washington and Kuldeep, it makes perfect sense for them to play Reddy rather than Axar. They already have enough spinners and a deep-enough batting line-up, so it gives them the chance to give Reddy more exposure to Test cricket, particularly as a batter. And because India have all that batting depth, another specialist batter like Padikkal could end up playing a bit-part role across a series while not even giving India the possibility of a few overs if circumstances should allow it.

India may well pick Padikkal ahead of Reddy in their next home series, against South Africa in November, where they may feel the need for a specialist batting option against a potentially far more penetrative bowling attack. But in this series against West Indies, India had something to gain, and not a lot to lose, from playing Reddy.