The 'Gambhir' challenge

As Indian cricket is bracing up for a new era after Gautam Gambhir took over Rahul Dravid to become India’s head coach, there will be a lot on his agenda in the three formats.

As the frolics of the T20 World Cup triumph settle down, India embark on a tough tour Down Under, where they’ll play five Tests, and the series could be pivotal in deciding their fortunes this cycle apart from the two home series against Bangladesh and New Zealand respectively. However, Gambhir’s first series in charge is a white-ball tour of Sri Lanka at the end of the month.

The first big one for Gambhir, is India’s tour of Australia at the end of the year. India won their previous two Test series in Australia, in 2018-19 and 2020-21, and this contest could be crucial to the final shaping of the WTC points table.

The wounds of a heartbreaking loss in the final of a home Cricket World Cup might have healed a bit with the T20 World Cup trophy, but India have two big ICC events awaiting in this format in the next four years — the Champions Trophy next year and the Cricket World Cup in three years time.

The team is also very likely to undergo a transition in between. Rohit Sharma will lead the side at the Champions Trophy but Gambhir is aware that the process of blooding the next captain, and the next set of players, will need to begin soon.

The Men in Blue haven’t tasted a title win in this format since 2013, when they won the Champions Trophy, and he will hope to turn those fortunes around next year.

The team’s big win in the T20 World Cup was shortly followed by three major retirement announcements as Rohit, Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja drew curtains to their T20I career.

While the next event is two years away, this is a crucial transition period for the side that Gambhir will have to oversee. Aside from picking the new captain, the former India opener will also have the task of filling in three key positions in the starting XI.

With the number of players the IPL is churning out, a problem of plenty galore for Gambhir to deal with and making optimal use of the resources available to him could be the difference between disappointment and defending the title in 2027 at home.

Kohli’s first assignment with head coach Gambhir will be the three-match ODI series against Sri Lanka in August, with the 35-year-old being named in the squad that was announced last week.

“Kohli is believed to have stated that previous issues will not affect their professional relationship in the dressing room. Following the (T20) World Cup final in Barbados, discussions were reportedly held on the matter. Kohli, who, like Gambhir, is from Delhi, assured the concerned parties that he recognises both are working towards the country’s interests and is ready to move on from earlier disagreements,” a report on Cricbuzz stated.

Most notably, the two Delhi-born cricketers were involved in a verbal spat during an IPL 2023 match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Lucknow Super Giants. Gambhir was the mentor of LSG back then, but shifted base to Kolkata Knight Riders for IPL 2024, where he was their mentor as well.

During an IPL match between RCB and KKR in Bengaluru this season, both Kohli and Gambhir buried the hatchet with a hug after the game, which the Knight Riders won by seven wickets.

The 42-year-old had recently spoken up on his relationship with Kohli, saying that the people’s perception was “far away from reality”. “The perception is far away from reality. My relationship with Virat Kohli is something this country doesn’t need to know. He has as much right as I do to express himself and help our respective teams win. Our relation is not to give masala to the public,” the former India opener had said.

Thirty-seven-year-old Rohit Sharma and Gambhir are also contemporaries, having made their international debuts four years apart. They were regular India team-mates between 2009 and 2013 and opponents in the IPL up until 2018.

Kohli, along with skipper Sharma, were likely to skip the ODI series against Sri Lanka, but the two players made themselves available for the series given this is Gambhir’s first tour as India head coach. The tour of Sri Lanka starts with a T20I series in Pallekele from July 27. The ODIs will be played in Colombo and will be played in the gap between August 2 and 7.

Gambhir hasn’t coached a domestic or international team previously in List A or first-class cricket, but that’s not unusual for the Indian team. Both Ravi Shastri and Anil Kumble did not have prior coaching experience when they took charge in 2014 and 2016 respectively.

It’s true that Gambhir has been involved in a fair share of heated moments — on social media and in person — over a number of issues ranging from cricket to politics. However, he is believed to be someone who goes to great lengths to stick up for those in his team. For example, his altercation with Kohli in IPL 2023 is believed to be a result of him not taking kindly to a verbal spat between Kohli and the LSG fast bowler Naveen-ul-Haq. In 2017, he had a run-in with the Delhi state coach over the handling of youngsters in the team. Gambhir has been outspoken against giving an individual excessive limelight in a team game, a philosophy he followed during his mentoring stints at LSG and KKR.

Off the field, Gambhir is believed to have been a mediating influence between the head coach Chandrakant Pandit, whose old-school methods brought huge success in domestic cricket, and a number of overseas players who found Pandit’s approach unusual.

Gambhir got the job on the back of successful stints as a mentor of two IPL franchises. Under his guidance, Lucknow Super Giants qualified for the playoffs in their first two IPL seasons, and then he oversaw Kolkata Knight Riders win the title in 2024. So in that regard, Gambhir’s pathway to the India job is extremely different to his predecessor Rahul Dravid, who spent years as head of the National Cricket Academy and coaching India’s age-group and A teams.

Gambhir, in his role as a media professional, has been critical of senior players resting between high-profile assignments but with his tenure likely to run until the 2027 ODI World Cup, he might have to work with a workload management plan to have India’s best players at their fittest for the most important assignments.

Rohit and Dravid were often aligned in their strategies and used data and analytics in their planning, like when they selected four spinners in their T20 World Cup squad because of conditions in the West Indies. Gambhir is driven more by instinct and less by data, something he has stated a number of times, which means he may need to get on board with a major aspect of Rohit’s captaincy, both with India and formerly with Mumbai Indians.

Alongside this, Gambhir must manage dressing room superstars, oversee generational transitions, and implement changes in mindset, strategies, and skills to maintain and enhance India’s position in cricket. Being head coach is a prestigious role, but Gambhir clearly has a formidable task ahead.

Views expressed are personal