How Team India's Test empire crumbled in a year of white-ball glory

What an odd, bewildering year this has been for the Indian men’s cricket team. While the women largely dominated the happy headlines and crafted a legacy-shaping, narrative-defining first World Cup win, we watched the men play in split screen mode in 2025. Between Champions Trophy glory and the brisk, bittersweet red-ball goodbyes from Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma came the rise of the new order, embodied by Shubman Gill’s fine run in England. And yet, running through it all was the constant hand-wringing and incessant tweaking of personnel by a team management which has often, from the outside, seemed mired in doubt. The defining feature of Indian cricket’s 2025 campaign was the overshadowing of some fine wins by the self-sabotaging of a proud home Test record. It was almost as if there were two Team Indias. One was the usually assured, monopolistic winning machine that is the white-ball setup, which will face its big test in the T20 World Cup early next year. The other was a confused jumble of a Test team which was undone by misplaced strategy: the quest to manufacture advantage on doctored, spinning pitches on home soil, a throwback-era move for which the largely inexperienced batters were completely ill-prepared. If there was a silver lining, it was that most of Indian cricket’s lows seemed avoidable to everyone but those involved in the decision making. If there was a warning bell, it was that the dismantling of a top Test side can take so little time. The scale of the two defeats to South Africa, in Kolkata and Guwahati, was staggering. Of course, India bounced back in style in the white-ball leg. The pitch, then, rose to become symbolic of India’s 2025 Test campaign. Queer it, and the team came undone. Play it straight, like on the batting-conducive surfaces in England, and the team thrived. It was an early promise of better times which unfortunately petered out by the end of the year. The England tour, where Gill rose to become the kind of match-shaping colossus he is expected to be, was eventually an aberration. The quiet home Test series win of the year, against the West Indies — Gill’s first as Test captain — too did not stick. The 12-year period during which India won every home Test series and built a fierce reputation is now a distant memory. In just over 12 months, the team has lost two out of three home series: a 0-3 loss to New Zealand, followed by the 0-2 drubbing against the well-prepared South Africans. The downslide started, as it turns out, with the appointment of Gautam Gambhir as head coach in July 2024.The Test defeats had a ripple effect — some much-needed intro spection — and an important course-correction followed in an other format. Gill, the anointed one, was dropped from the T20I side for poor form two months ahead of the World Cup. It was a late acknowledgment that in sport, as in life, narratives aren’t always constructed. Poster boys cannot always be manufactured on the field of play. Long-term sporting success is as much organic as strategic. The team management must adjust plans accordingly. Sides that seek to consistently dominate need an element of magic: a rare, ethereal quality that stems from talent and thrives on encouragement. Constant boardroom tinkering and incessant backroom analysis can often undermine this quality. Add to that the punishing cross-format scheduling and one wonders how Gill — who had a long run without a T20I fifty and seemed prone to injury — would have kept up with it all. There may be pressure from all sides to replace Kohli and Rohit’s aura with a new face, someone who can straddle easily across formats and make things easy for both the leadership group and the broadcasters. For now, though, Gill, the ODI and Test captain, will have to bide his time even as World Cup glory beckons the others in the T20 side. The rollback could be an important lesson for the men at the centre of all the attention: Gambhir and selection committee chief Ajit Agarkar. Both are proponents of flexibility and horses-for-courses strategies. Yet they have come across as surprisingly intractable — until the Gill move — when it comes to pushing their vision through. It is now clear that Gambhir, who is more of a public face than Agarkar, was brought in with the clear task of replacing under performing seniors and reshaping the side in his own image. He is yet to command the kind of public respect that his predecessors Ravi Shastri and Rahul Dravid did, and there could be a reason for that. Indians still tend to view the ideal coach as a stern, disciplinarian father figure, especially when it comes to shepherding a young team. As previous such misadventures have shown, with Greg Chappell here and Justin Langer in Australia, the move doesn’t always work out at the international level and only spurs chaos. As commitments end with the likes of Kohli and Rohit hammering inconsequential tons against hopelessly weaker sides in domestic List A games, it almost seems as if Indian cricket is back in the late 1990s. Whispers, innuendo, speculation and perceived agendas have again become talking points. Method and manipulation seem to go hand in hand. The T20 World Cup in the coming year could, however, showcase Gambhir at his strategic best in a format he is clearly more comfortable with. The team also has Abhishek Sharma, who had a standout year. For now, the Test side, having sunk to sixth in the World Test Championship table, can take a backseat. Gambhir and India will be hoping there will be good T20 times to come. HIGHS Champions Trophy (ODIs, Dubai; Feb–Mar): Won title with a 5–0 record after the 3–1 Test loss in Australia, that too without Bumrah. Beat Bangladesh, Pakistan (Kohli 100*), New Zealand (group), Australia (SF), New Zealand (final; Rohit 76). T20 Asia Cup (UAE; Sept): Won title with a 7–0 run and 3 wins over Pakistan. In the final on Sept 28, Pakistan went from 113/1 to 146 all out (Kuldeep 4/30). Tilak Varma scored 69* (53) in the chase. Tests in England (Jun Aug): Series drawn 2–2 in first assignment after Rohit/Kohli retirements and Gill as captain. Gill, India’s player of the series, scored 754 runs at 75.40 (HS 269). Siraj took 23 wickets, including 9/190 and the Player of the Match award at the Oval. LOWSDressing-room unrest: Kohli/Rohit eased out of Tests by head coach Gautam Gambhir and selector Ajit Agarkar. Lots of ‘communication breakdown’ chatter in the media. On Oct 8, Rohit credited Rahul Dravid for the Champions Trophy win and didn’t mention Gambhir. Mohammed Shami questioned being left out across formats despite domestic form. T20I dips: Suryakumar 218 in 19 innings (avg 13.62; HS 47*, no fifty). Gill 263 in 14 (avg 23.90; SR 142.93). Gill’s return dislodged Sanju Samson from opening and then pushed him out of the XI. Gill dropped from the T20 WC squad but Suryakumar Yadav retained as captain. No handshakes: After the Pahalgam attack (Apr 22) and an India-Pakistan clash (May), India used a ‘no-handshake’ policy vs Pakistan (also at Women’s ODI WC and Rising Stars). In the Asia Cup, India declined to receive the trophy from ACC chief Mohsin Naqvi. In the U-19 Asia Cup final (Dubai, Dec), there was criticism of the team’s behaviour after a 191-run loss to Pakistan (Pak 348; Ind 156).Test dips: NZ’s 0-3 home whitewash (late 2024) spilled into 2025. BGT lost 1-3. England series drawn 2-2; WI beaten 2-0. South Africa won first series in India in 25 years. India lost in Kolkata by 30 runs (India 93 chasing 124); in Guwahati by 408. Gambhir was criticised for upsetting team balance and opting for ‘average’ allrounders over specialists.Chinnaswamy stampede: After RCB’s first IPL title ended an 18-year wait, celebrations saw 11 dead and 56 injured as crowds swelled to upwards of 2.5 lakh people. BCCI criticised organisers and RCB executives were arrested. The Chinnaswamy was banned.