Wriddhiman Saha Kept Better Than Anyone. It Was Not Enough

Ask a bowler who spun the ball in India between 2015 and 2021 who they wanted behind the stumps and the answer was Wriddhiman Saha. Ask a selector who they wanted behind the stumps and, increasingly, it was not. That gap is the whole of his career, and it is the clearest illustration available of what the Adam Gilchrist revolution actually did to the wicketkeeping trade: not merely raise the batting bar, but retire the specialist entirely.

Saha played forty Tests across eleven years, made 1,353 runs at 29.41 with three hundreds, and took more than a hundred catches and a dozen stumpings. He was, by most technical assessments including those of the bowlers he kept to, the best pure wicketkeeper India had produced since Syed Kirmani. He was never a fixture, and he finished as a footnote to a debate about somebody else.

What the keeping actually involved

The job Saha did is worth describing properly, because it is invisible to anyone reading a scorecard. Keeping to Indian spinners on a fifth-day surface at Chennai or Nagpur is the hardest technical assignment in cricket. The ball turns, bounces variably, comes at the keeper from an off-spinner and a left-arm spinner within the same over, and the keeper stands up to the stumps for a full session with the bat pad and the close fielders in his eyeline.

Saha did that job for Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and a series of others through India's most dominant home era. In January 2018 he became the first Indian wicketkeeper to take ten catches in a single Test, and in 2019 the fifth Indian keeper to pass a hundred Test dismissals. He was also, by physical build and reflex, unusually good at the low diving take in front of first slip, which is where a lot of India's home wickets came from.

None of that appears in the figure most people know him by, which is a batting average of 29.

The problem with being Dhoni's successor

Saha's Test career effectively began in earnest when MS Dhoni retired from the format at the end of 2014. He had made his debut in 2010 and spent five years as the reserve. From 2015 he was first choice, and for about three years he did the job well enough that it was not discussed: a hundred against West Indies in 2016, another against Australia at Ranchi in 2017 made while batting with an injury, and keeping that his own captains publicly rated as the best in the world.

The problem was structural and it arrived from outside. Dhoni had accustomed Indian selection to a keeper who scored heavily; Rishabh Pant then arrived with the batting to do it again and hundreds in England and Australia to prove it. Once Pant was available, the question was no longer whether Saha kept better — everyone accepted that he did — but whether the difference in keeping was worth the difference in batting.

The honest answer, in a side that batted first on turning pitches and needed the seventh batter to make runs, was probably not. India were winning Test series abroad for the first time in their history with Pant scoring at seven, and the specific value of superior glovework, real as it is, is difficult to convert into a match result you can point to.

The 2022 exclusion, and the row that followed

The end came badly. In early 2022, after the New Zealand series, Saha was left out of India's Test squad. He said publicly that he had received a phone call from the head coach, Rahul Dravid, telling him he was no longer in the plans, and made clear that he felt the treatment did not match his record or the assurances he had been given.

He also published a screenshot of messages from a journalist who had, in his account, threatened him with negative coverage after Saha declined an interview. The BCCI investigated, and the episode became a story about media conduct as much as about selection. It is a genuinely uncomfortable part of the record and it is difficult to summarise fairly: Saha was, on the evidence he presented, treated poorly by a journalist and dropped by selectors who were entitled to make the decision they made. Both of those things can be true at once.

His final Test had been in Kanpur against New Zealand in December 2021. He was thirty-seven.

The innings that shows what he could do with a bat

The batting record is thinner than it deserves to be, and the single best piece of evidence against the "he could not score" verdict is a T20 innings. In the 2014 IPL final at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Saha made 115 not out from 55 balls for Kings XI Punjab — ten fours, eight sixes — the first hundred anyone had scored in an IPL final.

Punjab lost, chased down by Kolkata Knight Riders in the highest successful pursuit any Twenty20 final had seen, with Manish Pandey making 94. That is a fitting emblem of Saha's professional luck: the first century in a final of the world's biggest T20 competition, immediately overwritten by someone else's innings.

His franchise career ran to seventeen seasons and more than 2,900 runs across five teams — Kolkata, Chennai, Punjab, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Gujarat Titans, where he opened the batting in the side that won the title in 2022 at the first attempt. He was thirty-seven that season and scoring at a strike rate above 130 in the powerplay, which is not the profile of a batter who cannot play.

The Bengal career, and the ending

Saha's domestic career for Bengal spans nearly two decades, including a first-class double century, and he captained and kept for a side that reached Ranji Trophy finals during his time in it. He retired on 1 February 2025, his final match a Ranji fixture for Bengal against Punjab that Bengal won by an innings — a tidier ending than the one the Test career got.

What the career establishes

Saha's record makes a specific and slightly bleak argument about modern Test selection. In a game where the keeper is now picked as a batter first, a genuinely superior wicketkeeper who bats adequately has almost no route to a settled place. The advantage he provides — half a chance a session, a stumping that would not otherwise happen, byes that never get conceded — is real and unmeasured, while the disadvantage is a batting average sitting in a column everybody reads.

It is possible to think Indian selection got the Pant decision right and still think something was lost. Saha is the last of a line in Indian cricket that runs through Kirmani and Nayan Mongia: keepers picked because they kept, who were expected to bat but not required to carry an innings. That line is now closed, in India and nearly everywhere else.

The fairest verdict, and the one his own bowlers would give, is that he was the best at the actual job of wicketkeeping that Indian cricket has had in forty years, and that being the best at it stopped being sufficient during the years he was available. Career figures are on the Wriddhiman Saha profile.

Sources and method

Career aggregates, dismissal records, match figures and dates are taken from published records and official BCCI and IPL sources, cross-checked against contemporary reports of the matches described. The account of the 2022 exclusion and the subsequent dispute follows the player's own public statements and the BCCI's response at the time; no private conversation is reported here as fact beyond what he stated publicly. Assessments of his keeping relative to his contemporaries are the author's reading of the record and of contemporary commentary.