Kolkata: If fit, picking Rishabh Pant should be a no-brainer. We are talking about a generational talent who doesn’t feel the need to adjust his game to a format or a situation but would rather impose his game on it. But the abundance of resources and the hierarchy within the Indian cricket structure means Pant doesn’t straightaway walk into the ODI side after his road-accident triggered hiatus, not while KL Rahul is around. This is a conundrum India must sort out well before the Champions Trophy arrives at their doors, beginning this upcoming series in Sri Lanka.

Compare their approach and Pant and Rahul are like chalk and cheese. This T20 World Cup marked Pant’s return to mainstream cricket, and by the look of it, nothing about his game has changed. Rahul, on the other hand, has been impressively solid in this format, affecting 48 dismissals as wicketkeeper apart from scoring 1355 runs at an average of 58.91 with two hundreds and ten fifties. And since this format still demands a bit of restraint in the middle overs to ensure maximum returns, Rahul still comes across as the most suitable anchor.

So who will keep wickets for India going forward? “It’s a tough call to make,” said India captain Rohit Sharma in a press conference, ahead of the first ODI against Sri Lanka in Colombo, on Thursday. “Both are quality players, and you know the abilities of both the players. They are match-winners in their own way. They have won a lot of games for us in the past.”

Pant had kept wickets in the T20 World Cup but Rahul hasn’t done anything to prompt switching wicketkeeping duties in ODIs. If that remains the case, it becomes a bit difficult for Pant to feature in the eleven as specialist batter only. Also because Shreyas Iyer has done enough in last year’s ODI World Cup and this IPL — which he won as Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) captain with Gautam Gambhir as mentor — to retain his No.4 spot. The only way Pant, Rahul and Iyer could all feature in the eleven is if India field just five specialist bowlers, an unlikely combination given all-rounder Hardik Pandya has made himself unavailable for the ODI leg.

This toss-up between Rahul and Pant is a proverbial happy problem for India, something Sharma is looking forward to solving. “It is not easy to pick a team or a player when you have quality like that,” he said. “It’s always nice to have problems like that while picking the teams, so you know that there is quality in the squad. I look forward to these kinds of problems till I am the captain.”

That said, Sharma also hinted at not experimenting too much with a combination that had reached the World Cup final just nine months ago. “You get asked a lot whether this series is a preparation for the World Cup, or is this a preparation for the Champions Trophy,” he said. “It’s not a practice ground — it’s still an international game. We will keep in our minds what we want to achieve, but this is by no means preparation or practice or anything like that. We want to come here and play good cricket and get something out of the series.

“Of course we want to try everything possible, but when you’re representing the nation the quality of cricket should remain the way it is, and how we’ve played over the last few years. That is more important, rather than thinking about it as preparation and saying let’s go out and chill in Colombo. We don’t think like that.”

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