Two months after India won their third T20 World Cup, Suryakumar Yadav was sacked as T20I captain. In came prolific run-scorer Shreyas Iyer, who had dominated the Indian Premier League in the last two seasons.

When Shreyas came to know this news, he was not surprised. Instead, in your casual, confident manner, The first words were that he knew it was coming. He “expected it.”

This was a strange statement from a player who has not played a single T20 match since December 2023. But then again, this is Shreyas, right? A player with tremendous confidence. 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. However, making him captain was a much bigger decision.

Shreyas was handed the captaincy of a world champion team and the dressing room was full of proven match winners. After seven matches, that confidence faced a brutal reality check.

Things have gone horribly wrong and naturally, the catastrophic consequences fall most heavily on the Captain. Shreyas Iyer became First Indian captain not to win in his first seven T20IsWhile the defeat in England is India’s worst bilateral performance in this format. After seven defeats, he has become the only Indian captain along with Shikhar Dhawan to have more defeats than wins in his account.

This is a major decline for a team that had not lost a single series between the 2024 and 2026 World Cups, despite winning the tournament on both sides. In fact, ever since losing in the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup, the Indian T20I team has been on a meteoric rise and has never seen such days before.

How the mighty have fallen

But this is not actually the story of Shreyas Iyer. Captains show better results than any other team, but India’s collapse in Ireland and England speaks volumes about the people who have built this team as well as the man leading it. Gambhir and the selection committee decided to re-establish the T20 team that had recently won the World Cup. After seven matches, it’s fair to ask whether that reset has created more problems than it solved.

Now, before we get into all that, let me preface this by saying that it should not be forgotten that Gautam Gambhir’s methods in white-ball cricket have helped India win both the ICC white-ball tournaments during his tenure. What happened in Ireland and England happened in two bilateral series, and it won’t matter if India wins another ICC title next year.

Perhaps what is really worrying is that, for the first time, India have looked like headless chickens in two consecutive T20I series.

To see how bad things are at the moment, you have to take your memory back to Rahul Dravid’s India. great former cricketer Had decided on his players 18 months before the ODI World CupWhich was reflected in the team’s sensational unbeaten innings till the final. After a heart-breaking defeat in 2023, Rahul Dravid guided the Indian team to the T20 World Cup win in 2024, his only ICC trophy as the head coach of the Indian team. An incredible amount of data went behind that win. Dravid also sought data about wind speed in stadiums, said Himanish Ganju, a data analyst who worked with the team during that period.

It was perhaps a huge drop from the standards when the India captain had said earlier last week that he was unable to figure out the field placement in Ireland because the ground in Belfast was not a circle and had areas that we don’t usually see in cricket grounds. In England, India once again fell behind in preparation and failed to adapt to the conditions in all their T20Is.

This was almost a reflection of Shreyas Iyer, who perhaps did not get enough time to prepare and study after being announced as India captain. The announcement may not have come as a shock to him, but he certainly hasn’t changed, or underestimated, the demands of T20I cricket, a format he hasn’t played in for some years.

This tactical immaturity at the top has spilled over directly into the playing XI, creating a domino effect of bizarre selection dilemmas.

Patidar and chaos in batting order

An unprepared captain is bad enough. Add to this a finicky team management, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Take, for example, the problem of Tilak Verma. Everyone knows that India’s biggest strength, their ultra-aggressive batting unit, is also their biggest weakness. There are days when runs flow, and there are days when runs dry up just as quickly.

The main source of inconsistency of the batting unit is the top order, which often loses wickets while trying to provide aggressive starts. In 2024, India played Tilak Verma at No. 3, a direct antidote to this issue. If someone at the top of the order failed, Tilak had the ability to rebuild the innings before handing over to the finishers.
Tilak Verma was fixed as India’s No. 3 in the T20 World Cup, but due to a miscalculation of India’s batting line-up, he was eventually shifted to No. 5. This may not have been his permanent position, as Tilak’s best innings in T20Is have come at No. 3, where he has two centuries and three fifties at a strike rate of 152.

Yet, for some unknown reason, the batsman finds himself at No. 6, often facing spinners at the start of his innings, which is considered to be his weak aspect of the game.
The fight against spin is not Tilak Verma alone. India’s left-arm heavy batting unit was exposed by right-arm off-spin in the T20 World Cup 2026. One has to wonder whether the team management would have found a solution by now. Unfortunately for India, their biggest discovery in the T20 format turned out to be left-handed batsman Vaibhav Suryavanshi. Well, they couldn’t control that.

However, this is where we encounter the elephant in the room: Selection committee ignored two-time IPL winning captain Rajat Patidar For the No. 3 or 4 spot, despite his proven spin-hitting ability. Ideally, Rajat could compete with Shreyas and Tilak for the middle-order spot, and depending on form, India could pick two of the three.

Instead, what did India do? He made Tilak Verma the vice-captain and Shreyas Iyer the captain, ensuring two places in the batting order. The selection committee did not consider the fact that Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan were at No. 1 and 3, and Sanju or Vaibhav were at No. 2. And there was no way they could have Shreyas bat lower than No. 4, which meant that despite being promoted to vice-captaincy, Tilak was always going to be set up for failure.

A simple solution to this entire problem could have been for a settled top-order batsman (like Ishan or Abhishek) to take over the captaincy of the Indian team on a temporary basis. After this, Shreyas Iyer, Tilak Verma and Rajat Patidar can be given a chance in the middle order, and the rest of the line-up is as follows.

The confusion was not limited to the batting order. India repeatedly cut and changed their bowling combinations, searching for an all-round balance that was never accomplished. Roles shifted from one sport to another, specialists were asked to do jobs they were not chosen for, and teams were becoming unsure of their own identity.

Did Gambhir break the T20 team?

The result of all this is that India have failed to win a single match in two different T20I series. Viewed in isolation, it is completely meaningless; After all it is a bilateral series. But a deeper look reveals that the team management has not stuck to its process even once. After each game, they cut and changed, looking exactly like a panicked unit who didn’t have a Plan B or C if Plan A failed.

An orderly, coherent playing eleven is formed only when there is complete clarity at the top. This requires a leadership group that relies on stable, objective cricketing logic rather than chasing headlines or pursuing personal agendas. Unfortunately, Shreyas Iyer has stepped straight into a chaotic environment, where he is in dire need of solid, unbiased guidance, not a new experiment in every game.

Perhaps seven matches are not enough to assess a captain’s ability. They probably aren’t even good enough to evaluate a coach. But they are sufficient to evaluate a process. Right now, India’s process looks much less certain than it did two months ago.

One has to wonder, in their attempt to reset the Indian team for the next cycle, has the Indian selection committee and team management broken up an Indian team that didn’t really need fixing?

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