Gautam Gambhir delivered a fiery press conference after India's record-breaking victory in the 2026 T20 World Cup on Sunday (March 8). The Suryakumar Yadav side defended their title on home soil with a 96-run victory against New Zealand at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. They became the first team in history to win consecutive titles as well as lift the prestigious trophy on home soil.
Boosted by becoming the first-ever Indian team head coach to win two ICC titles, Gambhir lashed out at his critics and claimed he is not accountable to social media. The 44-year-old claimed that he was answerable to only people in the dressing room.
“First of all, my accountability is not towards social media. My accountability is primarily towards those 30 people sitting in the dressing room, and not towards anyone else. If I can work honestly with them, if we can put in the hard work honestly – my accountability has never been for anyone else, nor will it be today or in the future. Even if I win two ICC trophies as a coach, it doesn’t really matter, because those 30 people are the most important to me in my coaching tenure. No one else matters," said Gambhir in the post-match press conference.
Gambhir lashed out at Indian cricket's obsession with milestones once again and claimed that the team should only celebrate trophies. He claims that if a player is concerned about reaching a landmark, it hurts the team's cause. He praised Sanju Samson's approach in all three games, as he missed out on a century by a close margin.
"For too long in Indian cricket, we've spoken about milestones, and I hope, till I'm there, we're not going to talk about milestones. You can see it very easily as well. You can see it in the last three games, what Sanju [Samson] did - 97 not out, 89 and 89. Imagine if you would have been playing for a milestone, probably we wouldn't have got 250. So I think this is for you guys [media] as well. Stop celebrating milestones, celebrate trophies. That is going to be important, because the bigger purpose of a team sport is to be winning trophies.
"Scoring personal runs has never mattered to me, and it will never matter to me. Actually I have been very fortunate that Suryakumar Yadav and me were on the same page, especially on this front," said Gambhir.
"The best chance to give ourselves to win this World Cup was that how we react when someone like a batter is close to 100. If someone is batting on 94, does he have the courage to go and get 100 next ball, rather than thinking about getting 100 for three or four balls. I think the guys have done that brilliantly. All of them in the dressing room bought into this mindset. The only way you could hit the big totals. is when you're putting your team ahead of your own self. Everyone in that dressing room was putting the team ahead of himself, and that is the reason why we could achieve something special like this," Gambhir added.
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Aayush Kataria is a Senior Copy Editor at Times Network with four years of experience, having started his career in the organisation. He is a key memb...View More
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