If Kohli wants to play Pandya in Melbourne, he should consider using Rishabh Pant as an opener

In all likelihood, Virat Kohli will play Hardik Pandya in the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne. But playing him in place of a sixth batsman could weaken India’s batting line up.

Not just in the last Test at Perth, but in almost all the overseas Tests in South Africa and England that India lost, it was largely due to batting failures. In such a scenario, is it prudent to go a batsman short when the series is on the line? One misstep could lead to a missed opportunity.

However, going by Kohli’s track record and captaincy style, there is little doubt he will include Pandya in his playing eleven at Melbourne. In such a scenario, he is going to have three front-line seamers and a spinner. Pandya, for all his shot-making ability, is a notch below Rohit Sharma or Hanuma Vihari when it comes to batsmanship.

So, including Pandya in place of Vihari would certainly weaken the batting. Moreover, this will also mean that the most likely opening pair will be that of a struggling Murali Vijay and the greenhorn Mayank Agarwal, which certainly does not inspire much confidence at the top of the order.

Some experts have suggested dropping Pant and opening with Parthiv Patel. But Pant has done reasonably well as a wicket-keeper, except one crucial dropped catch at Perth. Similarly, Vihari had a decent outing with both bat and ball at Perth. It will be unfair to both of them if they are dropped for the failure which was more due to tactical blunders from the team management than anything else.

In such a scenario, an out of the box solution could be to bring in Pandya in place of KL Rahul and ask Pant to open the batting, with a license to go after the bowling. That way, Vihari too gets to stay in the playing eleven and he could come in handy as a second spinner in the later stages of the Test.