A mellow evening in Dharamsala, a shirtless Instagram story, and a rain break spent taking photographs of mountains. The week around Punjab Kings had been loud. Wednesday evening at the HPCA Stadium was anything but.
In the days leading up to their meeting with Mumbai Indians, conversations around Punjab Kings had drifted well beyond results and cricket. There had been speculation around player fitness, reports of unrest inside the dressing room, and chatter around social media activity involving members of the squad. The franchise had already responded publicly to some of it, with co-owner Preity Zinta urging people not to peddle “calculated misinformation”.
On Wednesday morning, before the buses had left for the HPCA Stadium, Prabhsimran Singh posted a photo on Instagram. Shirtless, standing by a quiet riverside in Dharamsala with mountains in the background, he posted an emoji of one hand raised to his lips, hinting that it was time to shut out the noise. No caption. No explanation.
Just a 25-year-old who had spent much of the past week being discussed online as a cautionary tale about weight gain and late nights, deciding that a picture was worth considerably more than the words being written about him.
By Wednesday evening, Punjab Kings were at training. They arrived in good spirits. The session was scheduled to begin at 6 pm, under skies that had turned grey shortly after 5. It started. Within 10 minutes, the rain came.
What followed was, in its own way, one of the more striking images of Punjab Kings’ week. The players did not trudge back to the dressing room looking deflated. They stood near the outfield of one of the most beautiful grounds in world cricket, the Dhauladhar range filling the horizon, and took photographs. Of the mountains. Of the ground. Of each other.
A mellow evening interrupted by weather quietly turned into something resembling a team comfortable in its own space.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED: GONSALVES
Assistant bowling coach Trevor Gonsalves had arrived at the press conference before training with energy. Four losses on the trot will do things to a coaching staff, but whatever it had done to him was not visible.
“It’s as what it was when we started,” he said, when asked about the mood in camp. “Nothing has changed in the dressing room. We are quite confident about it.”
Punjab Kings began IPL 2026 with six wins on the trot. The team that built that run is the same team that has now lost four in a row. Gonsalves’ point, unstated but fairly clear, was that a slump does not necessarily undo a foundation. Good sides lose patches. They identify what went wrong and try to fix it.
“There were some ups and downs, there were some places where we needed to iron it out. And we have been doing that.”
Three games — against Mumbai Indians, Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Lucknow Super Giants — remain.
He repeated it as though it deserved emphasis.
“Three games are a lot of games.”
He said it with the deliberateness of someone who had clearly spent some time doing the maths.
‘ANY BLOGGER CAN POST ANYTHING’
Then came the question he had seen coming from a mile away. The franchise had responded to the social media storm. Preity Zinta had responded too. But how does the dressing room itself deal with it? Does any of it actually get through?
Gonsalves smiled slightly.
“I expected this question.” He did not dodge it.
“Any blogger and any person can go up and put something on social media and there are lakhs of people agreeing to it.”
There was no real outrage in the answer, nor much interest in prolonging the subject.
“Frankly speaking, we are not too concerned about what social media says. We are only concerned about tomorrow’s game. Only concerned about cricket.”
The players, he added, hardly needed coaching on this.
“How the big players handle themselves in this situation is absolutely important. You don’t need anyone to teach them. They are big enough and they know how to handle themselves.”
The noise around Punjab Kings this week had been loud enough for the franchise to respond publicly, and it had clearly landed within the camp too. But the players in this dressing room — Shreyas Iyer, Arshdeep Singh, Yuzvendra Chahal, Prabhsimran Singh — are not strangers to pressure or scrutiny. IPL seasons magnify both form and criticism in ways few tournaments can.
By Wednesday evening in Dharamsala, though, Punjab Kings did not look like a side consumed by either.
HOW PONTING IS DEALING WITH NOISE
The person Gonsalves credits most with setting that tone is the head coach.
Ricky Ponting, by his assistant’s account, has created an environment where players are aware of the outside noise without letting it dominate the dressing room.
“Ricky is a thorough professional when it comes to all this. He knows he is dealing with elite cricketers. It’s really great to see how he handles it.”
Ponting, Gonsalves explained, does not amplify the noise by making it the subject of every team meeting. Nor does he pretend it doesn’t exist.
“He doesn’t beat up on it, but he knows exactly how to deal with them. He makes them understand — you are all part of this.”
There is a line, Gonsalves said, between staying connected to the outside world and getting consumed by it.
“Being too much into social media is not good and not bad. There is a line there and it’s been drawn.”
Punjab Kings face Mumbai Indians on Wednesday — a side already eliminated, playing out the string with nothing to lose and therefore very little to fear. In the IPL, those are rarely straightforward evenings.
By now, Punjab Kings have heard the noise. The franchise has responded to it. The players, in their own ways, have too.
On Wednesday evening in Dharamsala, though, the focus inside the camp appeared to have shifted back to something simpler.
There is still cricket left to play. Three league games, two more evenings in Dharamsala, and little time left for distractions.
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