As the curtains came down on India’s cricket team on Thursday in Bristol, captain Shreyas Iyer sat down for a long conversation with head coach Gautam Gambhir. What was said cannot be known for certain, but the intensity of it, the stillness, the lack of gesturing, suggested two men deep in thought after their side had slumped to a fifth loss in six games.
It has been a horror tour, unlike anything India’s white-ball side has produced in recent memory. For the first time since 2018/19, India have lost back-to-back T20I series. For the first time in years, India were swatted away, as if they were never in the contest to begin with.
That needed reflection.
The first loss of the tour, against Ireland in Belfast, was a blip. The second rang the alarm bells. Newly appointed captain Shreyas Iyer admitted India were underprepared, that they hadn’t reckoned with how far Ireland had come.
The third game, the first of the England series, was washed out, so there was nothing to read into it either way. The fourth ended in defeat. The fifth, a 125-run mauling at Trent Bridge, confirmed this was no longer a rough patch but a crisis.
IND vs ENG Highlights, 4th T20I
India were bowled out for 76, their second-lowest T20I total in history, behind only the 74 they made against Australia in 2008, and the fastest they have ever been bowled out in the format. Not one batter reached 20.
Shreyas Iyer said after the Trent Bridge defeat that it was not possible for India to sink any further. Seventy-six all out was as bad as it could get.
He was wrong.
Two days later, at the County Ground in Bristol, India lost again. Harry Brook’s England chased down 159 in just 13.5 overs, a chase with unmistakable echoes of England’s demolition of India in the 2022 T20 World Cup semi-final.
That semi-final gets talked about often because it marked the moment India’s white-ball cricket changed direction. Deadweight was cut, players were scouted afresh, and the side embraced a modern batting template. The work paid off in back-to-back World Cup triumphs, and India became, briefly, the most ruthless T20I side in the format’s history.
Such was the confidence that flowed from that success that Indian cricket sacked its World Cup-winning captain and handed the reins to Shreyas Iyer, a capable cricketer who hadn’t played for the national side in nearly two years.
But here we are. Five defeats in six matches into the new cycle, and India are in freefall. The batters aren’t clicking, the bowling plans keep changing match to match, and the confidence that justified sacking a World Cup-winning captain now looks like it was never earned in the first place.
How did we get here?
To answer that, rewind exactly a year, to an England summer that had India just as anxious, for a different reason.
That series had a new captain too. Shubman Gill was handed the Test captaincy after India’s Border-Gavaskar Trophy hopes in Australia collapsed. Gill’s side fought hard but arrived at the final Test at The Oval trailing 1-2, undone by a string of questionable calls from the team management. On the final morning, England needed just 35 more runs with four wickets in hand. Then Mohammed Siraj produced a spell for the ages, and India somehow squared the series.
Siraj’s spell didn’t just save the series. It changed the conversation. The questions that should have been asked, about selection, preparation, tactical drift, simply vanished. Gambhir survived. The scrutiny faded. Indian cricket moved on, no wiser and no worse off, at least on paper.
A year later, there was no Siraj. Nobody conjured a miracle when India needed rescuing in the decisive moments of the T20I series. And this time, the same tactical muddle that got a pass in 2025 had nowhere to hide. India trailed 0-3 after four matches, beaten comprehensively by the very side they’d knocked out of the World Cup semi-final only months earlier. What went unpunished once has now been fully exposed.
IS GAUTAM GAMBHIR TO BLAME FOR INDIA’S COLLAPSE?
India’s core failing across both series was an inability to adapt. The batting group kept reaching for the same method regardless of what the surface demanded, and with too many batters cut from a similar cloth, the side had no answer whenever the ball did something in the air or off the seam.
Instead of seeing off testing spells and working the strike over, batters kept swinging across the line, a plan that backfired in Ireland and again in England.
That, more than anything, was a preparation failure. In Bristol, England repeatedly targeted the short straight boundary, lapping deliveries that weren’t there to be lapped, and Harry Brook turned even good balls into boundaries doing exactly that.
In Ireland, by Iyer’s own admission, India hadn’t accounted for the ground’s dimensions, the captain said the venue “wasn’t round enough,” leaving his batters guessing at which parts of the field to target.
That’s about as damning as it gets.
But whose job was it to solve that puzzle before a ball was bowled? Isn’t preparing a team for these exact conditions, ones he has toured for years, precisely the coach’s brief? Boycott once told Gambhir, on air, in this country, that he was “rubbish,” that he simply couldn’t play cricket in England. That was about his batting, in 2014. Twelve years on, with India taking a beating on these same grounds, it isn’t just his batting anymore that the word could apply to.
Former India cricketers Anil Kumble and Varun Aaron tried to make sense of the wreckage after Bristol, and their conversation kept circling back to the same uncomfortable questions:
- Why was a two-time T20I centurion in Tilak Varma moved away from his natural No. 3 slot?
- What exactly is Shivam Dube’s role in this batting unit? Does he need shielding from pace? Is Axar Patel the better option in his place? Where does he actually fit?
- What’s the cricketing logic behind India’s evident preference for left-handers?
- Why has the bowling attack changed almost every game? Why not simply hand Shreyas Iyer five bowlers and tell him to build around them?
- And why is Washington Sundar in this XI at all? What need does a second all-rounder serve, when a specialist batter or bowler picked for the conditions might have served the team better?
These aren’t questions a settled team management should still be fielding two series into a new cycle. They’re questions about whether the team management ever had a settled plan to begin with.
INDIA HAVE BEEN WRONGED
The T20I in Bristol was a hard watch. India’s batters, wary of throwing wickets away, started conservatively against a fired-up attack. But this batting group was never built to play that way, and it isn’t where its strength lies.
Every batter bar Shreyas Iyer got boxed in by England and fell searching for a way out. Tilak Varma, batting at No. 6, barely got going in a phase where he was meant to accelerate from ball one. He couldn’t. That’s simply not his game.
It was Iyer’s own conviction that carried India to 158, but against Brook and Salt in that form, it was never going to be enough.
Afterwards, Iyer called this a team in transition and asked for patience, insisting it would all come together eventually.
It probably will. India will return to flatter surfaces, the runs will come back, and most of these questions will quietly go away. They usually do. But England has now exposed Gautam Gambhir’s tactical blind spots twice in a year, once masked by a miracle, once laid bare without one, and until those blind spots are addressed, there’s no reason to expect a different outcome next time the conditions turn hostile.
Last year, Mohammed Siraj papered over the cracks with one extraordinary spell. This time, there was no Siraj to save Gautam Gambhir from his own team management.
– Ends
