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"He is not your favourite player. The selectors seem to have brought him. Don't think the team management likes him," Gavaskar said in a pre-match show televised by Sony Six. "Karun Nair has every right to ask the team management why he is not in the team. He deserves an answer. You didn't pick an extra specialist batsman earlier, but now that you have, Karun Nair deserves an answer."
Apart from captain Virat Kohli, and Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane to an extent, none of the Indian batsmen have managed to make any impact in the series. Nair is known to be a technically solid batsman and may have been the solution to India's middle order woes, but clearly the team management thought otherwise and preferred Vihari instead.
It was against England in 2016 when Nair became only the second Indian batsman to score a triple century in Test cricket. The Karnataka batsman smashed an unbeaten 303 at the MA Chidambaram stadium in Chennai.
However, the competition for spots in the Indian middle-order was so high that he had to make way for Ajinkya Rahane in the one-off Test against Bangladesh, making him only the fourth batsman to be excluded from the playing XI of the next Test after scoring a triple hundred in his previous game. He did win back a place in the XI for the home series against Australia, but only managed scores of 26, 0, 23 and 5, and since then has never made it to the playing XI.
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