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Gautam Gambhir cares what you think.
Gautam Gambhir@GautamGambhir
Thanks a lot Dr @ShashiTharoor! When the dust settles, truth & logic about a coach’s supposedly “unlimited authority” will become clear. Till then I’m amused at being pitted against my own who are the very best!
Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor
In Nagpur, enjoyed a good &frank discussion with my old friend @GautamGambhir, the man with the hardest job in India after the PM’s! He is being second-guessed by millions daily but stays calm &walks on undaunted. A word of appreciation for his quiet determination and able
6:16 PM · Jan 21, 2026 · 985K Views
445 Replies · 377 Reposts · 6.36K Likes
He is not chronically online – at least publicly. His online presence mostly mentions friends’ birthdays and crypto ads, with pauses to congratulate his team in between. It feels like your dad’s Facebook account.
But it is clear that Gambhir is hyper-aware of what people are saying about him. He is combative, like he’s fighting a war with the trolls with every arch of his eyebrows. Gautam Gambhir knows you’re shit-talking him.
Years ago, Rahul Dravid realised that things had changed with the team towards the end of his playing career. Players would run up and show him messages they received online. Dravid told them to stop looking. A young Ravindra Jadeja would slide into the DMs of the odd hater on Twitter to argue with them.
So this is a different world. But what is weirder is that a coach is so interested in using social media for his image. It isn’t leaking things to journalists or asking his former teammates for something positive. Gautam Gambhir isn’t hoping the narrative around him changes; he’s actively trying to shape it.
But if India lose this World Cup, the story will be set in stone.
When their batters collapsed against South Africa, people raced for their chisels.
***
This was not a pitch where you wanted extra spin. India understood this, and Kuldeep Yadav made way for Arshdeep Singh. But they were still a specialist seamer short. Shivam Dube got caught bowling to a set partnership, and India were in trouble.
Varun Chakaravarthy has been unhittable, but South Africa treated him like a step hit bowler.
And then at the end, India had Hardik Pandya instead of a specialist seamer, and he got met. But before the game, they made the call for extra seam, so it was only a choice of Washington Sundar playing ahead of Axar Patel in terms of selection.
On paper, they looked like the better team. On this wicket, South Africa were..
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We call it format bleed.
It’s a modern cricket issue. There is so much cricket, and you can only remember little chunks of it, and plenty of that is recent. Your thoughts on a player might be from a few great ODI knocks, and all the Test failures are either so long back, or you just missed them.
Modern cricket is basically impossible to keep in your head. A month back, everyone is telling me Daryl Mitchell is the greatest all-format player in the world right now. And he is certainly a superstar in ODIs. His T20 cricket has been ok, but he’s often good when needed. But in Tests, he’s averaging 31.
Does that matter as he is launching various Indian bowlers back over their heads, and you can still remember that run he had in Tests and some vague memories of great T20 World Cup knocks? No.
We have seen players picked for Tests because of format bleed. Sai Sudharsan and Jason Roy say hi. And ODI players who play in T20 franchises, despite not really earning it.
But what we’ve also seen recently is a complete bleed in coaching styles. First Brendon McCullum, and then his acolytes. And now Gautam Gambhir. Their styles and methods are directly taken from white-ball cricket.
And weirdly enough, format bleed might be the issue that finally ends Gautam Gambhir’s reign.
He was a controversial pick from the start, he had no coaching experience, there were political connections and the relationship with Virat Kohli was tenuous. It was a lot to unpack, and the internet did what it does best, it went one way or the other.