Key Points:
The vice-captain of the T20 team is now out of the 15-player squad for the World Cup. Even writing this does not give the correct picture. Fitting Shubman into T20 Team India was a special part of the project to make him the captain of Team India in all three formats.
Delhi: For next year’s T20 World Cup, not only India, but also other countries whose teams have been announced so far, the biggest surprise was presented by the selectors of India and they dropped Shubman Gill from the team. There is bound to be a debate on such a decision and the same thing is happening, the player who was the vice-captain and whom the selectors had brought into the T20 team with great expectations under one of their schemes, the honeymoon with him ended in such a way that he was dropped from the team. Have the selectors made a mistake now or have they rectified the mistake they made earlier of forcefully fitting Shubman into the team without a place?
The vice-captain of the T20 team is now out of the 15-player squad for the World Cup. Even writing this does not give the correct picture. Fitting Shubman into T20 Team India was a special part of the project to make him the captain of Team India in all three formats. Shubman did not take proper advantage of this golden opportunity and he could not justify the decision of the selectors. He could not prove that there is a place for him in the playing eleven as a batsman. Even in forcing him to fit, the team’s well-built balance was disturbed which was reflected in the team’s poor performance. Otherwise, they would have almost made the team for the T20 World Cup and now the same team would have been allowed to play so that the remaining shortcomings would have been removed.
The end of this T20 honeymoon with Shubman will be counted as one of the biggest discussions of team selection in India. In the last one year or so, Shubman has not been able to show any special talent in this format. Scored 291 runs in 15 T20 Internationals between July 2024 and December 2025, without scoring a single 50 (highest score 47, against Pakistan in the Asia Cup). Even though the strike rate of 137 indicates that he did not cause any harm to the team as long as he remained at the crease, but neither did he play so effectively that his contribution dominated the decision of the match and on top of that, poor fitness also spoiled the rhythm. Out of the team for some special matches when he could have improved both his and the team’s record.
Even the advantage that he could have got from being the vice-captain could not save his place in the team. This clearly means that now the selectors have left the project of making Shubman the captain in all three formats in the future. There is something lacking, that is why Shubman was dropped from the team earlier also. He was not even selected for the last World Cup. Now it seemed that the selectors had burdened Shubman with so much expectation that it was spoiling his cricket confidence. If the impact of this failure is seen on his performance in both the remaining formats, then it will be the biggest loss of the T20 honeymoon.
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