Former South Africa cricketer AB de Villiers issued some advice to the India head coach Gautam Gambhir after the team suffered a 0-2 defeat against Ireland, followed by a 4-0 defeat against England in two consecutive T20I series.
As a reminder, AB de Villiers mentioned that scoring tons of runs in the Indian Premier League (IPL) and batting for the national cricket team is a completely different ball game where the players have no place to hide their weaknesses.
Back-to-back series defeats put questions over Team India in T20Is
With three T20I World Cup titles in the bag, including the 2026 T20 World Cup trophy, Team India has positioned itself as a supreme force in the shortest format of the game. Through the well-decorated domestic cricket ecosystem and, obviously, through the IPL, there is no lack of talent in Indian Cricket.
It was beyond imagination when they ended the two-match T20I series with a 2-0 defeat, and then England thrashed the Shreyas Iyer-led team by 4-0. Two consecutive series defeats hit the team hard, but as AB de Villiers said, it was a good lesson for the team.
“He (Gautam Gambhir) needs to take leadership and ownership of how this team will move forward. He’s got all the credentials to do so. Maybe this was not a bad thing to get a bit of a wake-up call. Bring those players who have scored so many runs in the IPL a little bit down to earth again,” AB de Villiers stated on his YouTube channel.
AB de Villiers compares IPL and international cricket
Without mentioning any name, the former international batter claimed that in the Indian Premier League, there were a lot of opportunities to score runs, unlike in international cricket, where cricket is at its best. De Villiers also stated that in international cricket, no one should expect to score runs always maintaining a top gear.
“Let them understand that this is international cricket; there’s no more weakness. In the IPL, there are always one or two bowlers you think you can score against. (In international cricket) there’s nowhere to hide, so you need to have more than one or two gears. You can’t always bat in the fifth gear,” AB de Villiers further said.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi failed to impress
Multiple batters in the current Indian cricket team’s T20I squad got loads of runs in the previous season of the Indian Premier League with their respective franchises. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is the prime example, who is on the national side after 776 runs in the IPL 2026 with the Rajasthan Royals.
He made his Team India debut in Manchester for the second T20I in the series against England, and played three matches before being dropped from the playing eleven. In three matches, the 5-year-old batter, who emerged as the highest run scorer in IPL 2026, could not cross the 15-run mark even in one match for India.
Sanju Samson, Tilak Varma- they also did well in IPL 2026 but failed for India against England.
