Former Indian cricketer Ravichandran Ashwin appreciated the fact that India head coach Gautam Gambhir opined on the difficulty behind dropping Sanju Samson from the T20I team recently as well. Samson returned to the playing XI in the three-match T20I series against Afghanistan, where he made a strong case with back-to-back half-centuries as well.

“Obviously, it was tough [leaving him out in the UK]. Probably the toughest decision I’ve taken in my coaching tenure is obviously leaving him out in that England series. Because obviously, the way he’s performed before that. But again, sometimes you go with players’ form as well,” Gambhir said during the post-series press conference (via Cricbuzz).

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“The decision to drop Sanju was wrong. What’s so honest about it? That is a fact. Sometimes when you take such a decision, you lose the player, the player’s confidence gets broken. But I really love the fact that he came out and admitted his mistake. My feeling is that all the decisions going forward should be taken from this perspective. You should also take the trust factor of the player into account. Then it will be much better,” R Ashwin said on his YouTube channel.

However, R Ashwin also stated that since Afghanistan were technically the hosts, the type of pitch to be used should have been their call as well.

“If Delhi were Afghanistan’s home ground, they should prepare the pitches, right? If they had the power to prepare pitches, they would not have played on pitches like that. Those were typical IPL pitches where Afghanistan faced difficulty. The home team should have an advantage. If that advantage is low-scoring matches, then we should be used to watching low-scoring games. We should not keep expectation as an Indian viewer that we will only watch high-scoring games,” R Ashwin concluded.