Gambhir defends 'right, not popular' calls as India win T20I series 3-2 in New Zealand

India finished their New Zealand T20I series with a 3-2 win despite losing the final two matches. In the fifth game on Sunday they made 191/8, and the hosts chased it down in 18 overs. Head coach Gautam Gambhir said afterwards that his job is to make the right decisions, not the popular ones.

Gambhir said the team would have gladly accepted a 3-2 result when they landed in New Zealand just two days before the first match, after nearly three weeks on the road. He credited a young squad, many of them on their first tour of the country, for adapting quickly. He also praised captain Shreyas for guiding an inexperienced bowling attack, noting that a captain is only as good as his bowlers and batters.

The bigger picture is a calendar built around Test cricket. With a shadow red-ball tour running alongside, several Test regulars will leave the ODI squad after the third match. Gambhir said the planning is done at BCCI level. Three days of preparation is not enough for red-ball cricket, he argued, while seven to nine days after the one-dayers can put players in the right mindset.

He also said that rotating stars is about backing people who have performed over a long period and keeping the dressing room secure. Asked whether he feared going into the series with a single practice session, he said the word does not exist in his life. Had India lost, he suggested, the conversation would have been about everything going wrong since the World Cup, because in India only results count.

Gambhir restated the approach of the past two and a half years: high risk, high reward cricket. He accepted that India will sometimes lose, even heavily, but said the philosophy will not change whether they play in England, Australia or at home.

The focus now moves to the 50-over leg, where the senior players have been training in Auckland. Gambhir indicated that the outcome will depend on how the inexperienced pace attack rises to the occasion, with several new faces likely to play because of workload management.

Read the original report: The New Indian Express.

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