Former India player turned veteran commentator Aakash Chopra has questioned why the BCCI reportedly had to issue a travel guideline for Team India. He also stated that it implies that the rules were being bent and potentially for some players as well. Notably, India faced a 1-3 defeat to Australia in the recently concluded Border-Gavaskar Trophy (BGT) 2024-25. Reports also suggest the BCCI has given a few
guidelines to the Indian team after the rather forgettable series, including asking all players to travel together in the team bus as well.

While talking about this in a video shared on his YouTube channel ‘Aakash Chopra’, he said, “The first report, which I liked, was that all players will travel in the team bus, and I am thinking this has been happening forever. The team bus has been named team bus because of that only, as the entire team will travel in it. At least until we were playing cricket, the team used to travel only in the team bus. It’s a very normal thing. It’s par for the course. It has to happen like that. It’s like telling someone that you would get breakfast and not lunch in the morning. However, if this has been said, it means some rules had been changed and would have especially been changed for some individuals.”

ALSO READ: “Shubman’s captaincy is very good” – Ravi Bishnoi on Shubman Gill

In the same video, Aakash Chopra added that players wouldn’t have been allowed to travel separately without the coach’s approval.

“Whoever did that has made a slight joke with Indian cricket and did a huge disservice because how can you treat people differently, or else you didn’t treat them differently but gave the entire team the allowance to come in 15 separate vehicles. It wouldn’t have happened without the coach’s approval. So somewhere or the other the coach or the team management allowed it to happen, that it’s okay whichever way you travel and then we can meet at the ground. That is just plain wrong. There cannot be a worse deed than that to spoil the culture where you allow someone to reach however and whenever,” Aakash Chopra concluded.