Two months after India lifted their third T20 World Cup, Suryakumar Yadav was sacked as the T20I captain. In came Shreyas Iyer, the prolific run-scorer who had dominated the Indian Premier League over the last two seasons.
When the news broke to Shreyas, he was not surprised. Instead, in his casual, confident manner, his first words were that he knew it was coming. He had “expected it.”
It was an odd statement from a player who had not played a single T20I since December 2023. But then again, that is who Shreyas is, right? A player of tremendous self-belief. His numbers in domestic cricket and the IPL justified another shot in India’s T20I setup, while his tactical acumen had long earned praise from teammates and coaches alike. There was little debate over whether he deserved a return. Making him captain, however, was a far bigger call.
Shreyas was handed the captaincy of a world champion side and a dressing room full of proven match-winners. Seven matches later, that confidence has met a brutal reality check.
Things have gone horribly wrong and, naturally, the horror results reflect the heaviest on the captain. Shreyas Iyer became the first India captain to go winless in his first seven T20Is, while the defeat in England marked India’s worst bilateral performance in the format. The seven defeats also leave him alongside Shikhar Dhawan as the only India captains with more losses than wins.
It is a stark fall for a team that had not lost a single series between the 2024 and the 2026 World Cups, winning the tournaments on either side of it. In fact, since losing the semi-final of the 2022 World Cup, the Indian T20I team has been in tremendous ascendancy and has not really seen days like this before.
HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN
But this isn’t really a story about Shreyas Iyer. Captains wear results more than anyone else, but India’s collapse across Ireland and England says as much about the people building this team as the man leading it. Gambhir and the selection committee chose to reset a T20 side that had just won the World Cup. Seven matches later, it is fair to ask whether that reset has created more problems than it has solved.
Now, before we get into all of that, let me preface it by saying that it should not be forgotten that Gautam Gambhir’s methods in white-ball cricket have helped India win both ICC white-ball tournaments in his tenure. What happened in Ireland and England happened in two bilateral series, and in isolation, might not matter at all if India lift another ICC title next year.
What perhaps is really concerning is that, for the first time, India have looked like headless chickens in two back-to-back T20I series.
To see how bad things are right now, you have to jog your memory back to Rahul Dravid’s India. The legendary former cricketer had settled on his players 18 months before the ODI World Cup, which was reflected in the team’s sensational unbeaten run to the final. After a heartbreaking loss in 2023, Rahul Dravid guided the Indian team to the T20 World Cup victory in 2024, which was his only ICC trophy as the head coach of the Indian team. An incredible amount of data work went behind that win. Dravid even asked for data about wind movements in the stadiums, as revealed by data analyst Himanish Ganjoo, who worked with the team during that period.
It was perhaps a stark fall from those standards when the India captain said early last week that he was unable to figure out the field placements in Ireland because the ground was not a circle in Belfast and had pockets that we do not usually see in cricket fields. In England, India were once again behind in preparation, failing to adapt to conditions in all of their T20Is.
It was almost a reflection of Shreyas Iyer himself, who perhaps did not get enough time to prepare and study after being announced as the India captain. The announcement might not have come to him as a shock, but he was definitely left short-changed, or horribly underestimated the demands of T20I cricket, a format that he had not played for a couple of years.
This tactical unreadiness at the top has trickled directly down into the playing eleven, creating a domino effect of bizarre selection dilemmas.
PATIDAR AND THE BATTING ORDER CHAOS
An underprepared captain is bad enough. Add to that a finicky team management, and it is a recipe for disaster.
Take the Tilak Varma problem, for example. Everyone knows that India’s greatest strength, the hyper-aggressive batting unit, is also their biggest weakness. There are days when the runs flow, and there are days when the runs dry up just as quickly.
The batting unit’s main source of inconsistency is the top order, which often loses wickets while trying to give aggressive starts. In 2024, India played Tilak Varma at No. 3, which was a direct antidote to this issue. If someone in the top order failed, Tilak had the ability to rebuild the innings before handing it over to the finishers.
Tilak Varma was locked in as India’s No. 3 going into the T20 World Cup, but due to India’s miscalculations of the batting line-up, he was eventually shifted to No. 5. It could not have been his permanent place, as Tilak’s best innings in T20Is have come at No. 3, where he has two hundreds and three fifties at a strike rate of 152.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the batter finds himself at No. 6, often facing spinners early in his innings, which is known to be his weaker facet of the game.
The struggles against spin are not Tilak Varma’s alone. India’s left-hand heavy batting unit was exposed by right-arm off-spin in the T20 World Cup 2026. One would have wondered if the team management might have found a solution to it by now. To India’s ill luck, their greatest discovery in the T20 format turned out to be a left-hander, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Okay, they could not have controlled that.
However, this is where we encounter the elephant in the room: the selection committee ignored two-time IPL winning captain Rajat Patidar for the No. 3 or 4 spot, despite his proven credentials of spin hitting. Ideally, Rajat could have competed with Shreyas and Tilak for the middle-order spot, and depending on form, India could have picked two out of the three.
Instead, what did India do? They made Tilak Varma the vice-captain and Shreyas Iyer the captain, locking two spots in the batting line-up. The selection committee did not consider the fact that Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan were locked in at No. 1 and 3, and either Sanju or Vaibhav was No. 2. And there was no way that they could have batted Shreyas below No. 4, which meant that Tilak, despite being elevated to vice-captaincy, was always being set up for failure.
A simple fix to this whole problem could have been that a settled top-order batter (like Ishan or Abhishek) takes over the captaincy of the Indian team on a temporary basis. Shreyas Iyer, Tilak Varma, and Rajat Patidar could then be given a go at the middle order, and the rest of the line-up follows.
The confusion wasn’t restricted to the batting order either. India chopped and changed their bowling combinations just as frequently, searching for an all-round balance that never quite materialised. Roles shifted from game to game, specialists were asked to do jobs they were not picked for, and the team looked increasingly unsure of its own identity.
DID GAMBHIR BREAK THE T20I TEAM?
The culmination of it all is that India have failed to win even a single match across two separate T20I series. Looked at in isolation, it is quite pointless; it is a bilateral series after all. But look deep enough, and you find that the team management has not stuck to their process even once. After every game, they have chopped and changed, looking very much like a panic-stricken unit that simply did not have a Plan B or C when their Plan A failed.
A settled, consistent playing eleven only happens when there is absolute clarity at the top. It requires a leadership group that relies on steady, objective cricket logic rather than chasing headlines or pushing individual agendas. Unfortunately for Shreyas Iyer, he has stepped straight into a chaotic environment where what he desperately needs right now isn’t a new experiment every game, but solid, unbiased guidance.
Seven matches are perhaps not enough to judge the calibre of a captain. They are perhaps not enough to judge a coach either. But they are enough to judge a process. Right now, India’s process looks far less certain than it did two months ago.
One wonders, in his attempt to reset the Indian team for the next cycle, have the Indian selection committee and team management broken an Indian team that did not really need fixing?
– Ends
