The former Indian opener Gautam Gambhir has said that the Indian captain Virat Kohli has never been a good “strategist” and his decisions after the defeat against Pakistan have been very disappointing again.
India lost their first game in the T20 World Cup 2021 against Pakistan by 10 wickets and after that, they made two changes in the playing XI for the next game against New Zealand. Both changes seemed totally logical at the time, but it didn’t work in the game.
Ishan Kishan was picked for Suryakumar Yadav and although it was said that Surya was injured, the change made complete sense, given the spin attack of New Zealand which had a left-arm spinner and a leg spinner.
The second change was Shardul Thakur replacing Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and the logic behind the move was to have another power hitter at no. 8 so that the tail wasn’t too long.
Dropping Bhuvneshwar was not going to compromise India’s new ball bowling too much as Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammad Shami were already there to take the new ball, apart from Varun Chakravarthy, who can also bowl with the new ball if needed.
Gautam Gambhir didn’t want India to make any changes after just one game in the T20 World Cup
However, Gambhir didn’t like the fact that India quickly changed the team combination after just one defeat. And Gambhir also insisted while writing a column for Times of India that these changes wouldn’t have been made by India’s newly appointed mentor MS Dhoni because he has played with Dhoni for a long time, and he knows Dhoni doesn’t make such quick changes.
“Kohli has never impressed me as a strategist. Why did he change the team from the one that played against Pakistan? I have played long enough to know that he would have nothing to do with these knee-jerk changes just after one game,” Gambhir wrote in his column.
