The entry of Gautam Gambhir into the head coach position in India after Rahul Dravid resigned after the T20 world cup 2024 was not typical. He neither came in as a nanny; he came in holding a whiteboard and scalpel slicing through pre-existing roles in the team in order to test what roles would work under stress. The announcement of the BCCI had made his work objective clear: Gambhir was to take the team since the Sri Lanka tour and establish a culture of excellence and develop young talent.
Gambhir has successfully managed to make the Indian team a laboratory of experiment since he assumed the reins. His practices are very conspicuous where his approach to batting positions, match roles as well as leadership duties are considered as variables. It is not intended to be experimentation due to the novelty but rather to establish flexibility and optionality and make the team more unpredictable and responsive to dynamic situations of matches.
Gambhir has presented his philosophy to the outside world, especially in T20 mode. He has termed batting orders as overrated after the openers stating that hits carry more weight than the number of runs made. By doing so, he is able to build a multi-purpose of a toolkit, opposed to a mannequins 1-to-11 configuration.
But his techniques have come under critical analysis in ODies, where conventional clarity who anchors, accelerates and finishes is traditionally paid. At the beginning of the tenure of Gambhir, the six highest batting places were intentionally fluid. Under his direction as the first four ODIs of India went on, there was a constant reshuffling of the batting order according to match up and combination of left right.
The example case is the Sri Lanka series in which Washington Sundar was batting at No. 4 of the first ODI, but was replaced by Shivam Dube in the second one, Axar Patel shifted to No. 5, and Sundar was pushed further down the line. These developments serve to highlight how Gambhir was ready to go against the norm and focuses more on flexibility than predictability, a move that has been met with mixed feelings among both the fans and the professionals.
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