Rubbish: Gautam Gambhir’s oldest insult in England just got a new meaning
As the curtains came down on the Indian cricket team in Bristol on Thursday, captain Shreyas Iyer sat down for a long chat with head coach Gautam Gambhir. It’s impossible to know for sure what was said, but his intensity, his stillness, his lack of gesture suggested two men deep in thought after their side slumped to a fifth defeat in six games.
It was a horror tour, unlike anything an Indian white-ball side has produced in recent memory. For the first time since the 2018/19 season India lost the T20I series. For the first time in years, India were crushed as if they had never been in the competition.
That required reflection.
The first loss of the tour against Ireland in Belfast was sudden. The other rang the alarm. Newly appointed captain Shreyas Iyer admitted that India were underprepared, that they had not reckoned with how far Ireland had come.
The third game, England’s first of the series, was washed out so there was nothing to read into it. The fourth ended in defeat. The fifth, a 125-run mauling at Trent Bridge, confirmed that 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 achieved against Australia in 2008, and the fastest ever bowled in the format. Not a single batter reached 20.
After the Trent Bridge defeat, Shreyas Iyer said it was impossible for India to sink any further. Seventy-six in all 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 semi-finals of the 2022 T20 World Cup.
This semi-final is often talked about as it marked the moment when Indian white-ball cricket changed direction. The dead weight was reduced, the players were re-examined and the side adopted a modern batting template. The work paid off in a string of World Cup triumphs and India briefly became the most ruthless T20I side in the format’s history.
Such was the confidence that stemmed from this success that Indian cricket sacked its World Cup-winning captain and handed over the reins to Shreyas Iyer, a capable cricketer who had not played for the national team for nearly two years.
But here we are. Five defeats in six matches of the new cycle and India are in free fall. The batsmen are not clicking, the bowling plans are constantly changing from match to match and the confidence that justified the sacking of the World Cup-winning captain now looks as if it was never earned.
How did we get here?
To answer that, rewind exactly one year to an English summer that had India just as anxious, for a different reason.
This series also had a new captain. Shubman Gill takes over the captain’s armband in the Test team after India’s Border-Gavaskar Trophy hopes were dashed in Australia. Gill’s side battled hard but went into the final Test at The Oval with a 1-2 record, undone by a series 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 leveled the series.
Siraj’s magic didn’t just save the series. It changed the conversation. The questions that should have been asked, about selection, preparation, tactical drift, simply disappeared. Gambhir survived. The check has passed. Indian cricket has moved on, none the wiser and none the worse, at least on paper.
A year later, there was no Siraj. No one conjured up a miracle when India needed a rescue in the crucial moments of the T20I series. And this time, the same tactical confusion that was allowed in 2025 had nowhere to hide. India are down 0-3 after four matches, beaten comprehensively by the team that crashed out of the World Cup semi-finals a few months ago. What once went unpunished is now fully exposed.
IS GAUTAM GAMBHIR BLAME FOR INDIA’S COLLAPSE?
India’s main failure in both series was the inability to adapt. The batting line-up kept reaching for the same method no matter what the surface called for, and with too many batsmen cut from similar cloth, the side had no answer whenever the ball did something in the air or on the seam.
Instead of chasing down Test spells and reworking the strike, the batsmen swung across the line, a plan that failed in Ireland and again in England.
This was more of a failure of preparation than anything else. In Bristol, England, he 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 just that.
In Ireland, by Iyer’s own admission, India had not reckoned with the dimensions of the ground, the skipper saying the venue “wasn’t round enough”, leaving his batting to guess which parts of the pitch to target.
That’s about as damned as it gets.
But whose job was it to solve this puzzle before the ball is dropped? Isn’t preparing the team for exactly these conditions, which they have been riding on for years, exactly according to the coach’s instructions? Boycott once told Gambhir on air in this country that he was “rubbish”, that he simply could not play cricket in England. That was about his batting in 2014. After twelve years of India being thrashed on the same grounds, the word is no longer just his batting.
Former India cricketers Anil Kumble and Varun Aaron tried to make sense of the Bristol wreckage, and their conversation kept coming back to the same vexing questions:
- Why was the two-time T20I centurion in Tilak Varma relegated from his natural No.3 position?
- What exactly is Shivam Dube’s role in this batting unit? Does he need pace protection? Is Axar Patel a better choice in his place? Where does it actually fit?
- What is the cricketing logic behind India’s apparent preference for left-handers?
- Why has the bowling attack changed almost every match? Why not simply hand Shreyas Iyer five bowlers and tell him to build around them?
- And why is Washington Sundar even in this eleven? What good is a second all-rounder when a specialist batsman or bowler selected for the conditions could have served the team better?
These are not questions that an established team management should still be putting two series into a new cycle. They’re questions about whether the team’s management ever had a solid plan to begin with.
INDIA WAS WRONG
The T20I in Bristol was a tough watch. India’s batsmen, wary of throwing away wickets, started conservatively against the batting attack. But this batting line-up was never built to play that way, and its strength isn’t there.
Every barrack Shreyas Iyer made it to England looking for a way out. Tilak Varma, batting at No. 6, barely got to the stage to accelerate from ball one. He couldn’t. That’s just not his game.
It was Iyer’s own conviction that took India to 158, but it was never going to be enough against Brook and Salt in this form.
Afterward, Iyer called it a team in transition and asked for patience, insisting it will all come together eventually.
It probably will. India will return to flatter surfaces, runs will return and most of these questions will quietly disappear. They usually do. But England have now exposed Gautam Gambhir’s tactical blind spots twice in a year, once masked by a miracle, once exposed without one, and until those blind spots are resolved there is no reason to expect a different result when the conditions turn hostile.
Last year, Mohammed Siraj bridged the cracks with one extraordinary spell. This time there was no Siraj to save Gautam Gambhir from leading his own team.
– The end
Issued by:
Saurabh Kumar
Published on:
10 Jul 2026 09:43 IST