BELFAST, IRELAND: The 0-2 whitewash suffered by India at the hands of Ireland in a two-match T20I series on Sunday, June 28, will rankle for a long, long time. The defending world champions came up short against the minnows by 34 runs in the first game on Friday, and failed to mount a comeback on Sunday, losing by a mere run.
Ireland, without several of their top players such as Paul Stirling, Josh Little, Curtis Campher and Mark Adair, to name a few, dominated proceedings over the Indians and made them pay dearly for their mistakes. The visitors failed to adapt to the conditions quickly and faltered when it mattered the most.
This whitewash, at the hands of a recently-minted Test nation, of a country deemed to be the biggest in international cricket, is bound to have long-ranging repercussions. The biggest of them all, quite naturally, will be the role of mercurial head coach Gautam Gambhir and newly-appointed captain Shreyas Iyer.
Shreyas Iyer replaced Suryakumar Yadav while Gautam Gambhir was retained as coach
Under Gautam Gambhir, India have suffered many ignominies, but none of them in white-ball cricket. With this loss against Ireland, this appears to have been rectified, with Indian cricket sinking to a new low. Shreyas Iyer, who was brought back from the wilderness to skipper India earlier this year after Suryakumar Yadav was jettisoned, got a raw first taste of captaincy in international cricket.
Iyer must be one of the chosen few darlings of Indian cricket to have been picked out from virtually nowhere to directly lead the country. To be sure, he had last played T20 cricket for India in 2023, and his promotion reeks deeply of the importance given by the Ajit Agarkar-led selection committee to the Indian Premier League.
Shreyas Iyer leads Punjab Kings in the Indian Premier League, who were in pole position to make it to the playoffs before losing six games in a row in the 2026 edition. And yet, the Mumbai batter was deemed capable enough to replace Yadav at the helm, even though the latter had just led the country to its third T20 World Cup title.
With the bat in hand, Iyer failed miserably across both innings against Ireland, returning with scores of 3 and 10. His discomfiture at the crease was visible primarily since he had been away from this format for more than two and a half years, and drafted back into it without being given the time to adapt.
India’s bowling unit also appeared out of depth
To be sure, others failed as well, and the burden of failure must not rest solely on Shreyas Iyer’s rather too fanciful shoulders. Sanju Samson, India’s hero of the T20 World Cup, returned with 5 and 0, while the much-vaunted Ishan Kishan scored 1 and 12 across the two innings. Tilak Varma (55 in the second match) and Abhishek Sharma (49 in the first match) were the sole bright spots with the bat.
It did not seem possible, but India’s bowling unit appeared as out of depth as their batting counterparts. Prasidh Krishna, playing the first game, conceded 57 runs in his four overs and was soon left out to accommodate Prince Yadav. Axar Patel went wicketless in the second match, but the management was happy enough with his couple in the first.
Jasprit Bumrah, rested due to a workload management program, was sorely missed. This acted as an antithesis, primarily because Agarkar had not realised that India would need Bumrah’s services to polish off the minnows. Nonetheless, it acted as a big catalyst that allowed a young-looking and inexperienced Irish team to decimate the visitors and bring them down to earth.
As with every managerial role, the buck stops with Shreyas Iyer and Gautam Gambhir, both of whom are answerable for this debacle. Never before has Indian white-ball cricket sunk to such a degrading position, and unless the coach brings about changes of a radical kind, he will lose the dressing room. As for Iyer, one wonders if he has been able to win his colleagues’ respect at all.
ALSO READ – What challenges will Shreyas Iyer face as India’s new T20I captain?
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