The appointment of Shreyas Iyer as India’s T20I captain seemed completely logical. He took Delhi Capitals to the IPL final, led Kolkata Knight Riders to the title and then took Punjab Kings to another final. Few contemporary Indian cricketers can present a comparable leadership resume. After the T20 World Cup, when the selectors needed a new captain, Shreyas was considered the best candidate.
Seven matches in the United Kingdom have complicated that decision.
India lost both T20 matches against Ireland in Belfast and were then whitewashed 4–0 by England, with the first match of the five-match series being abandoned after India completed its innings. Therefore, the world champions finished the tour without a win, losing six of their seven scheduled matches. Ireland defeated India for the first time in international cricket before completing a historic 2-0 clean sweep, while England lost by four wickets, 125 runs, nine wickets and 56 runs.
This sequence doesn’t suddenly invalidate everything Shreyas has achieved in the IPL. However, this reveals something that their franchise success could never fully establish. Shreyas is discovering that being an excellent IPL captain does not automatically make one ready for the central challenge of international captaincy.
In franchise cricket, players are generally acquired for predetermined roles. In international cricket, the captain has to find roles for the players he is given. That difference seems minor. In practice, this changes almost everything.
An auction can purchase the remaining amount; An international captain has to build it
IPL franchises start building their teams months before the tournament. The management identifies the type of cricket it wants to play, studies the available player pool and uses auctions to fill specific vacancies.
Need powerplay aggression? Buy one.
Need a wrist spinner for the middle overs? Bid for one.
Need an overseas fast bowler who can deliver in the death overs? Allocate the necessary budget.
Do you need a lower order batsman who is capable of attacking from the very first ball? Search specifically for that skill.
There may be compromises due to budgets and auction dynamics, but the fundamental process is role-driven. Players are purchased because their established skills suit the team’s needs.
Shreyas benefited from that structure at Punjab Kings. Priyansh Arya And Prabhsimran Singh could attack in the powerplay. Shreyas could have controlled the middle overs. Shashank Singh, Marcus Stoinis and all-rounders provided options later in the innings. Arshdeep Singh had a defined responsibility with the new ball and death overs, while Yuzvendra Chahal posed a special threat in the middle overs. Punjab’s intact core reflected the balance in batting, bowling and all-round depth.
The captain still had to take a decision. He still had to manage personalities, read match-ups and respond to pressure. But many of the most important questions had already been answered during recruitment.
International cricket starts at the opposite end. With Hardik Pandya unavailable, India cannot buy a seam-bowling all-rounder by participating in the auction. They may not get another Jasprit Bumrah as the bowling attack lacks control in the death overs. They cannot sign a specialist finisher if most of the best available batsmen in the country naturally prefer the top four.
Selectors choose from the Indian talent pool. Then the captain and the coaching staff have to convert that talent into a consistent XI. Shreyas produced many high quality cricketers for Ireland and England. He was not necessarily given a balanced team.
India’s team included Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson, Ishan Kishan and Vaibhav Suryavanshi – Four players whose most natural position is near the top of the order. Both Shreyas and Tilak Varma work primarily through the medium. Shivam Dubey was the most obvious specialist power-hitter, while Axar Patel and Washington Sundar offered all-round depth without duplicating Hardik’s combination of fast bowling and late-innings hitting. Bumrah was also missing from the team.
It is an abundance of potential, but potential and balance are not interchangeable. Therefore the first requirement of international captaincy is not tactical astuteness. It is creating clarity from overlapping resources.
India hardly had that clarity during the tour. Samson made his England series debut in the XI. Suryavanshi then replaced him at Old Trafford and opened with Abhishek, with Ishan remaining at the top of the order. Suryavanshi was dropped for the final match and Samson returned. Within a short series, the team appeared to simultaneously evaluate its starting combination and teenage talent.
This made it difficult to determine what the real competition was.
Was Samson competing with Ishan for the wicketkeeping position? Was he competing with Suryavanshi for the opening? Was Ishan benched as an opening batsman, or had India already decided that No. 3 was his long-term position? Was Suryavanshi selected because the team was in urgent need of his attacking style, or primarily because his IPL season made it almost impossible to drop him?
A franchise generally addresses such questions while building the team. India was trying to solve these during international matches.
Shreyas’ responsibility begins from here.
A national captain cannot simply distribute opportunities among deserving players. He must establish a hierarchy. This sometimes means telling an accomplished batsman that his preferred position is unavailable. This may mean supporting one wicketkeeper for the entire series while making the other wait. It could also mean protecting a teenager from becoming a visible symbol of the team’s uncertainty.
The batting order at Bristol provided a clear example of this. with Shreyas Iyer Batting well, India got Dubey ahead of Tilak. Dubey scored 22 runs in 23 balls, while Tilak was pushed down the order. Shreyas ultimately remained unbeaten on 80, but India could only reach 158 runs for seven wickets. England achieved the target by losing one wicket in 13.5 overs.
Sending Dubey before Tilak was not separately defensible. Dubey is an exceptional hitter against certain types of spin, and a captain must be prepared to change the order according to the match-up. But flexibility only works when it works within a clear structure.
If Dube was promoted to attack in favorable match-ups, the team needed to ensure he did so immediately. If Tilak was India’s better all-conditions middle-order batsman, pushing him down reduced the number of balls available to one of the players most able to adapt to the surface. The problem should be solved through reconciliation. This should not create uncertainty about who owns the innings. International captaincy does not mean giving a permanent number to every batsman. It is about giving each batsman a lasting understanding of his task.
Dubey’s role could be to enter whenever a specific spin match-up appears, be it in the seventh or 15th over. The role of Tilak may be to control deceleration while maintaining the ability to accelerate. Shreyas can take the responsibility of setting the pace in the middle order. But those responsibilities must be established before a crisis occurs.
India is also often seen inventing roles in response to the scoreboard. This problem affected the bowling attack.
Also read: Shreyas Iyer’s future ‘not in danger’ as captain after poor start as T20I captain: ‘Clarity needed’
It was not entirely Iyer’s fault
At Old Trafford, Arshdeep dismissed both England openers in the first over and Axar conceded only 20 runs from his four. India put pressure on England to chase the target for most of the time. Yet the absence of another reliable pressure bowler became decisive. Ravi Bishnoi’s 17th over included two back-foot no-balls, two free-hit sixes and 29 runs jacob bethel Changed the match. England achieved the target of 191 runs with one over remaining.
The no-balls were execution errors, not captaincy errors. Shreyas could not bowl the ball for Bishnoi. But the bigger issue was India’s bowling structure. Who was the designated wicket taker in the middle? Who was the controlling spinner? Who was Arshdeep’s accomplice in his death? After an expensive over, which bowler can be trusted instead of avoiding the next over?
In Punjab, those answers were largely included in the team. With India, Shreyas had to find his way under international pressure.
Trent Bridge made the problem even more apparent. England scored 201 for seven before India were bowled out for 76, their record defeat by runs in T20Is. During the fall, Letter He was promoted after the top-order collapsed, another move that seemed more like an emergency response than part of a systematic batting structure. Shreyas described the performance as “atrocious” and demanded greater individual responsibility.
He was right to demand responsibility. Yet international leadership also needs to reduce the number of decisions players have to make amid the chaos.
A batsman performs more freely when he knows whether he has been selected to maximize the powerplay, absorb pressure or attack the final overs. A bowler works with more conviction when he knows which phase is his. Clarity does not guarantee execution, but uncertainty makes poor execution much more likely.
This is the most important lesson Shreyas should take from the six defeats. At the franchise level, he could look at his XI and identify the specialists recruited for specific stages. With India, he cannot look for a Punjab Kings counterpart in every situation. There can be no direct equivalent to it.
India may need Ishan to transform from a natural opener to a genuine No. 3. They may need Dube to become a match-up weapon rather than a traditional fixed position batsman. He may need Akshar to accept greater responsibility as a finisher. They may need Prince Yadav or another inexperienced seamer to learn the tough overs while playing international cricket.
The captain’s question can no longer be limited to just this: Which player should I use? Must-Be: What does India need this player to become?
This is a difficult form of leadership. This demands long-term conviction as the immediate results may be poor. It also requires the captain to distinguish between experiment and illusion.
There is a hypothesis for the experiment. Confusion only creates change.
The latter was rampant in the India tour: changes in the opening combination, movement within the middle order and no systematic ownership of the difficult bowling stages. By the final match, England had managed 257 for three, with Jos Buttler making 131 and Harry Brook making 95 not out, before India fell behind by 56 runs despite half-centuries from Ishan and Tilak.
The blame for the defeat cannot be placed entirely on Shreyas. Selectors chose teams, coaches shared the responsibility of defining roles, and players repeatedly failed to execute basic skills. India also traveled without two cricketers – boomrah and hearty – whose presence may hide structural weaknesses, as each performs many difficult tasks.
Shreyas deserves time. Seven matches is not enough to erase the leadership records set over multiple IPL seasons. But six defeats are enough to challenge the notion on which his appointment was based.
His IPL achievements proved that Shreyas could command teams that were built with recognizable roles. The international captaincy is now asking whether he can build a functioning team from the imperfect collection of players available.
This will require stronger calls, less overlapping experiments and more clarity about what India expects from each member of the XI. This may also require Shreyas to abandon some of the tendencies that served him well in the IPL.
The auction provides a solution to a captain. International cricket hands them a group of cricketers and asks them to sort out the team on their own. Shreyas Iyer is learning the difference the hard way.
