The pressure is truly on newly appointed India T20 captain Shreyas Iyer as he continues to look for his first win as India’s T20I captain despite leading the team in seven matches so far. It all started with India suffering a 2-0 whitewash to Ireland and then India lost the five-match T20I series to England by a 4-0 margin. However, former India batter Wasim Jaffer backed Iyer despite his poor start as well.
“I don’t think he captained poorly. No one suddenly becomes a bad captain overnight. We’ve been praising him for a long time, and the results are there for everyone to see, especially the way he led his IPL team. This is his first opportunity to captain India in international cricket, so he’s in new territory. I think he’ll handle it. He has the confidence and self-belief to do so. He scored runs as well. Collectively, as a team, we played poorly. But I think Shreyas Iyer is not a bad choice going forward. In my opinion, he did a decent job,” Jaffer said on his YouTube channel.
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He further said that India played the series to test their combinations, keeping the next T20 World Cup in mind as well.
“I feel that this series was, in a way, treated as a trial. We gave opportunities to some new players, appointed a new captain, and were without Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya. We also didn’t include Kuldeep Yadav in this series. So, I think it seemed that the selectors and the coaches, especially Gautam Gambhir, wanted to try a few players and see whom they could trust going into the World Cup. It felt like the idea was to put these players into this series and see how they performed,” said Jaffer.
“Winning didn’t seem to be the primary focus. Of course, you always want to win, but the bigger objective appeared to be to assess how these players performed in overseas conditions. That would probably give them an answer as to whether these players are long-term prospects or whether they aren’t the right fit. That’s the impression I got from these two series. It seemed like they wanted to try out a few players and figure out which ones they could back going forward and which ones they couldn’t,” he concluded.
