The T20 World Cup 2026 can be the biggest stage for Team India coach Gautam Gambhir to shut up all his haters, who have been making noise on social media platforms for months now. India, one of the hosts of the T20 World Cup 2026, will be one of the favourites to win the title again. Ahead of the tournament, the team is in great form in this particular format.
Against New Zealand, they have so far performed with pure dominance. But the real tests will be in the T20 World Cup. For this tournament, the team management prepared themselves and prepared the team as well.
3 points to explain why Gautam Gambhir can be the bigger threat for Team India:
1. Over Experiment
For the last few months, Gautam Gambhir and his support staff were doing a lot of experiments to find out the right set of players to prepare a near-perfect playing XI. They tried to turn every possible stone.
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Harshit Rana is the perfect example of the experiment. The pacer was mostly known for his bowling, but now, he is capable of scoring a notable amount of runs as well. There is no doubt that Rana got a lot of support from the management.
Sanju Samson’s batting position is also another example of Gambhir’s experiment. During the Asia Cup 2025, the top-order batter had to perform from the middle order. Sometimes, these experiments proved not suitable, mostly during the tests and ODIs, where the performance of the team was not up to the mark. Will the management continue their experiments during the T20 World Cup 2026 as well? It’ll be very interesting to see.
2. Unstable Roles for Players
Because of experiments, players also needed to perform out of their preferred positions, like Sanju Samson. Arshdeep Singh is also among some of the few players whose performance for the Men in Blue is extremely good but often irregular in playing eleven. Sarfaraz Khan, Yashasvi Jaiswal, and Rinku Singh were among those cricketers who had very little reason to be benched or to be dropped from the squad.
Only for the number 3 spot, multiple batters were tested, including Shubman Gill, Sai Sudharsan, Karun Nair, and Washington Sundar. The middle order also gets shuffled.
Though in the past, the management claimed that they were doing all the shuffles and replacements to explore the strongest starting lineup.
3. Overreliance on batters
During Gautam Gambhir’s era, even the bowlers have to improve their batting skills. We talked about Rana before. Kuldeep Yadav and Arshdeep Singh are the only few bowlers who are in the team only as bowlers. Jasprit Bumrah is not in the distance, as he is an exceptional talent.
Many fans might have believed that T20 cricket is a batter’s format. But the T20 franchise leagues like SA20 and the Big Bash League (BBL) proved that even the bowlers can make the batters cry in the format. Inclusions of pace bowling all-rounders like Hardik Pandya and Harshit Rana will increase the batting depth by shortening spots for the bowlers.
In case batters fail to perform according to the plans, then there will be only the bowlers to save the day.
