Mayank Agarwal Averaged 41 as a Test Opener and Vanished

In the 2017-18 Indian domestic season, Mayank Agarwal scored 2,141 runs across the three inter-state competitions. Nobody had passed 2,000 before. He made 1,160 in the Ranji Trophy, still Karnataka's highest in a single season, with five hundreds; 723 in eight Vijay Hazare Trophy innings, the most anyone had made in an inter-state List A tournament; and 258 in the T20 competition at a strike rate near 145.

Selection in India is often accused of being arbitrary. On this occasion it was the opposite: a batter did the single most compelling thing available to a domestic player, and the selectors responded. What happened afterwards is the part that needs explaining, because Agarwal then did in Test cricket exactly what he had been picked to do, and it did not keep him in the side.

Melbourne, Boxing Day 2018

Agarwal made his Test debut at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 26 December 2018, aged twenty-seven, on a tour India would win — its first Test series victory in Australia. He made 76 in the first innings, the highest score by an Indian on Test debut in Australia, breaking a mark that had stood since 1947.

The context matters. India had cycled through opening combinations for two years and arrived in Australia with the position unresolved; the third Test was the point at which the tour either turned or slipped away. A debutant opener making 76 against Cummins, Starc, Hazlewood and Lyon at the MCG was not a promising cameo. It was the specific problem being solved by the specific man brought in to solve it.

What the Test record says

Agarwal played 21 Tests between 2018 and 2022, making 1,488 runs in 36 innings at 41.33, with four hundreds and six fifties. Two of the hundreds were double centuries. He was never once not out across those 36 innings, which is what happens to an opener who is neither a nightwatchman nor a lower-order survivor.

Read those numbers as an opener's numbers rather than a batter's. An average above 41 at the top of the order is a good career figure by any historical standard, and it is comfortably better than most of the men India has tried in the position since. Two double hundreds in 21 Tests is a conversion rate very few openers of any era have matched.

The larger of the two, 243 from 330 balls against Bangladesh at Indore in November 2019, contains a detail that says something specific about him: it includes eight sixes, which is the most in any of India's twenty largest Test innings. An opener making a Test double century by hitting eight sixes is not a blocker who accumulated. He was an attacking player who had learned, in that record-breaking domestic season, how to make attacking cricket last three sessions.

Why the career stopped

There is no dramatic story here, which is precisely why the case is interesting. Agarwal lost his place because of a lean run of about ten innings without a fifty across 2020 and 2021, and because during exactly that window India's opening position filled up permanently. Rohit Sharma had converted from white-ball opener into a Test opener of high quality; Shubman Gill had arrived and was obviously going to play for a decade. Agarwal's last Test was against Sri Lanka in March 2022.

The uncomfortable comparison is that Agarwal's career average of 41.33 is higher than that of several openers picked ahead of or after him, and that he was dropped at a point when his record in home Tests was outstanding. That produced a genuine public argument at the time, and the argument was reasonable. What answers it is not that he was treated unjustly but that Indian Test selection in the early 2020s was operating with a surplus, and the man who lost out was the one whose recent form was worst at the moment the decision fell due. That is how surpluses work, and it is bad luck rather than injustice.

The franchise career, and a much sharper limitation

Agarwal's IPL record is the weaker half of his case, and honesty requires saying so. He played from 2011 to the mid-2020s for five franchises — Royal Challengers Bengaluru, Delhi, Rising Pune Supergiant, Punjab Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad — and made 2,756 runs in 125 innings at an average of 22.97 and a strike rate of 133.53.

An average below 23 for a top-order batter is not good enough, and it is the clearest evidence that the run-scoring machine of the four-day game did not transfer entirely. He scored 1,094 of his runs in the middle overs at a strike rate of 139.2, which describes a batter who was often coming in to rebuild rather than to accelerate.

His best years were at Punjab, where he opened with KL Rahul — the pair put on 183 against Rajasthan Royals at Sharjah in September 2020, which stands among the highest partnerships in the competition's history — and where he was later given the captaincy. The captaincy did not go well, and the franchise moved on. In the field he took 59 catches, which is a respectable haul for an outfielder rather than a distinguishing one.

The other double century, and what home dominance was worth

The first of Agarwal's double hundreds came against South Africa at Visakhapatnam in October 2019, six weeks before the Indore innings and in only his fifth Test. He made 215 from 371 balls with 23 fours and six sixes, adding 317 for the first wicket with Rohit Sharma. It was the highest individual score made by anyone in Test cricket that calendar year, ahead of everything Steve Smith produced in an Ashes summer.

Two Test double centuries inside a single home season is a run of form very few Indian batters have produced, and it came in the middle of India's most dominant stretch of home Test cricket, a period in which the side did not lose a home series for the better part of a decade.

That context cuts both ways and should be stated in full. On one hand, an opener making 200-plus twice against attacks that were being ground down on turning pitches was doing what home conditions allow, and his overseas record is thinner. On the other, the men he was setting up those innings for were Kohli, Pujara, Rahane and Rahul, and a top order does not function without someone taking the new ball. India's habit through those years of winning by an innings was in part a function of an opener who regularly produced 100-plus and removed the shine before the specialists arrived.

The overseas record is where the critics have the stronger ground. Agarwal's tours produced the Melbourne 76 and useful contributions in New Zealand and England without a hundred, and a Test opener judged over a full career is judged by what he does in Perth, Johannesburg and Nottingham. He never got the volume of overseas Tests that would have settled the question either way. Twenty-one caps spread over four years is not enough of a sample for a definitive verdict, which is itself part of the argument.

The two careers do not contradict each other

It is tempting to treat the gap between an average of 41 in Tests and 23 in the IPL as a puzzle. It is not much of a puzzle. Agarwal's game was built on a full swing of the bat through the line, driving on the up, and a willingness to hit spinners over the top — a method that flourishes when the field is spread over five days and there is time to bat past an early mistake, and which produces a lot of caught-behind and caught-at-cover when twelve overs is the whole innings.

The domestic record supports the same reading. His 723 List A runs in a single tournament, breaking a record held by Shreyas Iyer, came in fifty-over cricket, where the shape of an innings suits a batter who needs twenty balls to establish himself. His T20 domestic returns were solid without being remarkable. The Indian domestic calendar gave him three formats to prove himself in, and he proved himself convincingly in two.

What the record actually argues

Agarwal's case is not that he was hard done by, though he has a right to feel it. His case is that he is the clearest illustration available of a specific fact about Indian cricket in the 2020s: the standard required to hold a Test place had risen to a point where averaging 41 as an opener, with two double hundreds, in a side that was winning, was not enough to survive one poor season.

Set that against the history of Indian cricket, where openers averaging in the low thirties held places for years, and the shift is stark. Agarwal did everything the pathway asks a domestic player to do, including breaking its central record, and got 21 Tests for it. That is a comment on the depth of the queue rather than on him. Career figures are on the Mayank Agarwal profile.