ESPNcricinfo looks at the road ahead for Gautam Gambhir as he takes over as India head coach
Shashank Kishore
More than six years after he last played a competitive match, Gautam Gambhir takes charge of the Indian team at the age of 42, becoming the second-youngest Indian after Kapil Dev in the late 1990s to be given the job. Fiercely competitive on the field, fiery and outspoken off it, Gambhir takes charge of an India team that qualified for the final of the last World Test Championship and the ODI World Cup in 2023, and has just won the T20 World Cup in 2024.
What are the major missions awaiting Gambhir?
His first series in charge is a white-ball tour of Sri Lanka later this month, followed by two home Test series against Bangladesh and New Zealand, which are part of the ongoing World Test Championship. India currently lead the WTC points table and are well placed to reach the final.
Gambhir’s first major fixture is India’s five-Test tour of Australia later this year. India have won their previous two Test series in Australia, in 2018-19 and 2020-21, and that contest could be crucial in determining the final WTC points standings.
So what does Gambhir have on his coaching CV?
He has never coached a national or international first-class or List A cricket team, but that is not unusual for the Indian team. For example, Ravi Shastri and Anil Kumble had no previous coaching experience when they took over in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
Gambhir landed the job after mentoring two IPL franchises. Under his guidance, Lucknow Super Giants qualified for the playoffs in their first two IPL seasons and then oversaw Kolkata Knight Riders’ journey to the title in 2024. In this respect, Gambhir’s path to the India job is vastly different from that of his predecessor Rahul Dravid, who spent years leading the National Cricket Academy and coaching India’s age-grade and A-group teams.
Will Gambhir have to make tough decisions in the near future?
In terms of personnel, with Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja retiring from T20Is, the transition is already underway in this format. The ODI and Test structures are stable for the near future and the question of transition or succession could arise only after the Champions Trophy and the World Test Championship in 2025.
Gambhir, in his role as a media professional, has been critical of senior players taking rest between high-profile assignments but with his tenure set to last till the 2027 ODI World Cup, he may have to work with a workload management plan to ensure India’s top players are at their best for the most important assignments.
Data or instinct, where will Rohit and Gambhir meet?
After winning the T20 World Cup, Rohit thanked Dravid in a poignant note for leaving all his “acclaims and achievements at the door” and making the players feel “comfortable enough to tell him just about anything”.
Rohit and Dravid were often aligned in their strategies and used data and analytics in their planning, like when they selected four spinners in their T20 World Cup squad due to the conditions in the West Indies.
Gambhir is guided more by instinct than data, something he has repeatedly stated, which means he may have to adhere to a major aspect of Rohit’s captaincy, both with India and formerly with Mumbai Indians.
Rohit (37) and Gambhir (42) are also contemporaries, having made their international debuts four years apart. They were regular teammates for the Indian team between 2009 and 2013 and opponents in the IPL until 2018.
Gambhir and Kohli in the same dressing room?
In 2009, Gambhir presented his player of the match award to the young Kohli who had scored his first century in ODIs. A year later, the two shared a crucial third-wicket partnership to avoid a collapse in the 2011 ODI World Cup final. Then in 2016, Gambhir made his return to the Test team under Kohli’s captaincy.
But it was their on-field confrontations in the IPL – as captains in 2013, and as mentor and player in 2023 – that defined the public perception of the equation between the two. In IPL 2024, however, the two were seen as friendlier towards each other in public. When asked about his relationship with Kohli, Gambhir said that “the perception was far from the reality”. And when Kohli was asked about it during the season, he said: “I hugged Naveen (ul-Haq, with whom he had an altercation in IPL 2023), and then the other day, Gauti bhai came to hug me… We are not children anymore.
Gambhir appears to be an agitator in public, will he be as aggressive as a coach?
It is true that Gambhir has been involved in his fair share of heated moments – on social media and in person – on a number of issues ranging from cricket to politics. However, he is seen as someone who goes to great lengths to defend his team members. For instance, his altercation with Kohli during IPL 2023 is said to have been because he did not appreciate a verbal spat between Kohli and LSG fast bowler Naveen Ul Haq. And in 2017, he had a spat with the Delhi State coach over the management of the team’s youngsters. Gambhir has been outspoken against giving undue prominence to any individual in a team game, a philosophy he followed during his mentoring stints at LSG and KKR.
So, what impact has Gambhir had as a mentor during KKR’s journey to the IPL 2024 title?
In IPL 2021, 22 and 23, Sunil Narine had scored just 154 runs and stopped opening for KKR. Once Gambhir returned to the setup as a mentor in 2024, he convinced Narine to move up the order and bowl without pressure. Narine went on to score 488 runs at a strike rate of 180.74 to go along with his 17 wickets, his best bowling performance in an IPL season since 2018.
Off the field, Gambhir is said to have been a mediating influence between head coach Chandrakant Pandit, whose old-school methods have brought huge success to domestic cricket, and a number of foreign players who found Pandit’s approach unusual.
Shashank Kishore is an Associate Editor at ESPNcricinfo