Individual milestones won’t be celebrated says Gambhir

Gautam Gambhir can never get tired of stating this one belief. In fact, he repeats it at every opportunity for anyone who hasn’t taken note — individual milestones won’t be celebrated in his tenure as head coach.

The latest reminder of this staunchly-held principle came from him after India picked up their third T20 World Cup trophy here on Sunday, hammering New Zealand by 96 runs in the final with a near-perfect all-round performance.

“I think my simple philosophy with Surya (India T20 captain Suryakumar Yadav) has always been that milestones don’t matter. It’s the trophies that matter. 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,” Gambhir, a two-time top scorer for his team in ICC global finals, said it forcefully.

The former BJP MP then urged the cricket media to celebrate “trophies” not “milestones”.

“Stop celebrating milestones, celebrate trophies. That is going to be important, because the bigger purpose of a team sport is to be winning trophies, not scoring individual runs. It has never mattered to me, and it will never matter to me,” he reiterated.

“...I have been very fortunate that Surya and me were on the same page, especially on this front,” said Gambhir. No names were taken but it is not too difficult to understand who are the “milestone men” he was referring to. In Indian cricket, it is an open secret that Gambhir has always found his game-changing 97 in the 2011 World Cup final or his 75 in the 2007 T20 World Cup summit clash being under-appreciated.

In both cases, it was Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s match-winning six (2011) and his master-stroke of giving Joginder Sharma the last over (2007) that became part of Indian cricket’s folklore.

Gambhir gave the example of Sanju Samson’s knocks in the “virtual quarter-final” against the West Indies and the ones he played in the semi-final and final as the finest example of how to play a team sport.

“You can see it in the last three games, what Sanju did. 97 not out, 89, 88 (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 as well,” Gambhir said.

Social media trash talk doesn’t matter:  Many of Gambhir’s philosophies are debatable, there are inherent contradictions if one digs deeper but there is no denying that in the last two years, he has been less appreciated for India’s triumphs and almost always drawn criticism for the disasters.

The social media wars between fan groups haven’t helped his cause either. But the man doesn’t care for the opinion of those who are watching from the sidelines.

“First of all, my accountability is not towards any social media. My accountability is mostly towards those 30 people who are sitting in the dressing room.

“...Even if I win two ICC trophies as a coach, it really doesn’t matter because in the future, I think those 30 people matter the most to me in my coaching tenure, no one else matters,” intense as ever, he made his point quite clearly about the social media game.

Teams built on “trust” not “hope”:  Those who haven’t tracked Gambhir’s journey during his formative years as a cricketer wouldn’t know that he was deeply impacted by the vagaries of team selection right from the time he played for Delhi.

Intensity became a synonym for his personality and a portrait of “Smiling Gambhir” became rarer than a Vincent Van Gogh oil painting.

Once he became the coach, he knew that he had to make players believe that they won’t be treated unfairly.

So he backed Abhishek Sharma through his poor form, along with Sanju Samson and Ishan Kishan, who were battling their own issues. Ultimately, all three of them repaid the faith in the best way possible.

“I think you pick the team on trust and faith. You don’t pick on hope. So when you pick someone on trust and faith, you don’t lose that trust and faith after four or five games. As simple as it can get. I’ve never, ever felt that we’ve ever picked a team on hope,” he said.

“The trust and the faith that all of us had in the squad, that we had in the dressing room, irrespective of whether we would have won this tournament... The faith and trust would have exactly remained the same.

“So for me, I think that is something which is very important. And that will never go away, the trust and faith.”