Ahmedabad: Milestone’s don’t matter, trophies do. High risk, high reward.
These are tenets on which Gautam Gambhir built India’s class of 2026 that crushed New Zealand in the final at Ahmedabad. To guide a squad towards defending a world title can sometimes be trickier than channelising them towards a cause.
When Rahul Dravid stayed on for the 2024 T20 World Cup, he and the team had an obvious goal – to overcome the heartbreak of 2023 ODI World Cup final. That Gambhir was able to shift the goalpost towards playing a more modern brand of cricket from the previous title and achieve it is credit to his coaching philosophy. This was evident in his past title success in the IPL as captain and mentor, which landed him the India job.
One thing Gambhir had in his favour was the flavour of the squad being completely fresh with several of the senior pros retired from the format. Having handpicked Suryakumar Yadav as captain, the two of them as team management were able to take players to places they had not dared to go before.
India’s 255 was the highest ever total for a T20 World Cup final. India also achieved 250-plus totals thrice in the last ten days, including the semi-final against England in Mumbai.
“The most important thing in this T20 format was that we didn’t want to be afraid of losing,” Gambhir said after the match. “Because if you are afraid of losing, you never win. I always believe that high risk, high reward is very important in this format. Because many times it happens that you play in a conservative way. I would have been happier if we had been out at 110-120, but our target was always to make 250 runs. We didn’t want to play the 160–180 runs cricket.”
There were occasions during India’s campaign though that slower pitches did not allow them to play this fearless brand of cricket. During the league phase, many of the Associate nations, especially USA in the tournament opener, chained the Indian batters. That’s when the talk from the coaching staff was to bat smart based on conditions.
The big pivot India made was to bring back Sanju Samson to break the left-handed monotony in the top order. That made it tougher for opposing teams to plan against India. Once the fabric of the pitches started becoming more batter than bowler friendly for India’s matches, the batting group led by Samson began to feast on the bowlers. “We just felt that we can have someone with Sanju’s ability and with that power at the top, we can have three explosive guys at one, two and three,” Gambhir said.
“The only thing we spoke about was how we can give ourselves the best chance to win this World Cup. And the best chance was, how we react when a batter is close to 100. If someone is batting on 94, does he have the courage to go and get 100 next ball, rather than thinking about getting 100 for three or four balls,” he said. “I think guys have done that brilliantly. It’s very difficult to change that mindset. But all of them in the dressing room bought into that mindset. And that is where the result is.”
On milestones and not thinking much about them, Player of the tournament Samson is a perfect illustration. The returning opener got big runs in three back-to-back knockout matches including the virtual quarter-final against West Indies. Scores of 97*, 89, 89 may feel like three hundreds missed. Within the team environment, it was read as three winning contributions towards the trophy.
“Ultimately, in that dressing room, your 97 or 98 will be appreciated as much as a 100,” the head coach said. “And that will not happen just by speaking, it will happen through our actions. In that dressing room, we were not thinking about taking a single on any ball, or needing two balls to make 50 or 100 runs. Those 10-20 runs can be the difference between winning and losing the World Cup.”
