Gautam Gambhir is learning that to be the face of Indian cricket is also to be its lightning rod

Something unprecedented happened during the Perth Test of 2024-25. India still needed seven wickets to beat Australia when, at the end of the third day, cricket journalists' inboxes chimed with a press release from a PR firm that manages communications for quite a few franchises, including those in the IPL.

This was no ordinary press release, a tool otherwise meant to convey news for wider publication. This was an opinion piece crediting coach Gautam Gambhir for "backing" Virat Kohli, for promoting KL Rahul to open the innings in the absence of Rohit Sharma, and for selecting Harshit Rana and Nitish Kumar Reddy. It observed how Kohli was seen hugging Gambhir, and proclaimed emphatically that questions raised against Gambhir after the home whitewash at the hands of New Zealand had all been answered.

Jasprit Bumrah, the captain of the team and the bowler who delivered India the win, was not mentioned even once. This was quite an extraordinary event in cricket, more so Indian cricket: a coach being pushed as the face of the team.

Barring a few exceptions that have not ended well, cricket has always been run by those on the field. The greatest of coaches have maintained the captain's primacy, especially in India where only recently, a young captain prevailed over his coach, who is also India's highest wicket-taker in Test cricket. Here the order was being inverted.

A little over a year later, having overseen India's second home-series loss in 12 months after the team went 12 years unbeaten, Gambhir finds himself at the receiving end of fans' ire for anything that goes wrong. All his work as a mediaperson has been dug up to create memes. His assistant, Sitanshu Kotak, even defended Gambhir unprompted in a pre-match press conference, using the record of the limited-overs teams to counter criticism of Gambhir's handling of the Test team.

There have now been reports that the BCCI has even considered the drastic step of splitting the coaching role, letting Gambhir keep the limited-overs teams. There is probably a reason why England, Australia and South Africa have moved on from this experiment. While it is important to acknowledge T20 is almost a different sport, India, of all countries, is not ready for two coaches competing for access to a limited number of players whose workloads need to be managed in order to prioritise different formats at different times. There is no way this works without proper decentralisation of power, and a director of cricket of certain heft that both the coaches answer to.

The merits of split coaching aside, it is unfair to blame the coach alone for results. There are so many things that go into a Test result that the coach can do only so much. We are now witnessing the first generation of players that didn't grow up knowing Test cricket is a non-negotiable. Perhaps the best talent in the country is now a more natural fit for limited-overs cricket. These series defeats are also a reminder of how relentlessly good R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja were.

India didn't have much luck either, losing tosses and playing ten versus 11 in Kolkata because of the neck injury to Shubman Gill. At the same time, South Africa had just the right kind of bowlers - their spinners were on their third tour of India - for the conditions that were rolled out.

There is no single element here whose removal can miraculously turn things around. If there is, it speaks of the mistakes made by the BCCI in letting things get there.

For Gambhir, fans digging up his rant at being dropped when he was vice-captain is the inevitable flip side of his being pushed as the face of the team. Fans can be unforgiving. They booed Rishabh Pant for taking MS Dhoni's place, and campaigned against Gill's inclusion in this T20 World Cup squad. They won't forget Gambhir's past virtue-signalling when he appears in betting commercials on the day of his team's match.

Not all smoke is without fire. Gambhir is the most powerful coach India have ever had. Greg Chappell had to face the might of player power, Duncan Fletcher was reduced to a rubber stamp, Ravi Shastri always deferred to Kohli, and Rahul Dravid was happy to be in the background. By all accounts, Gambhir hasn't even had to use his political currency to achieve that.

In a strong selection committee, there are hopefully checks and balances in place for the larger direction of Indian cricket, but the main criticism of Gambhir has been around the XIs India have played in Tests under him. It doesn't help that India have had four captains under Gambhir.

Gill, the regular Test and ODI captain, and Kohli took over the Test captaincy at identical times of their career with identical numbers. Gill the batter has even had a tour of England similar to the one Kohli had in Australia immediately into his stint. Shastri empowered Kohli, arguably going to the other extreme and becoming his hype man sometimes at the expense of other players. Perhaps Gill is not the kind of person Kohli is, but you can only imagine heads knocking should Gill choose to assert himself.

So as much as Gambhir becomes the face of the wins - and India have won the Champions Trophy, the Asia Cup and every bilateral T20I series under him - he also has to be the villain of defeats. If this mocking, this scapegoating riles Gambhir up - signs are there with his assistants defending him and him taking off on an IPL team owner for suggesting split coaching - perhaps it is time he wasn't put out there as much as he is.

Top-level sport comes with its insecurities with the intense competition for limited places. India's cricketers - and cricketers generally - have shown themselves to be at their best when working with a calm, equable, predictable and consistent coach. In a sport as capricious as cricket, determined as much by changing conditions over the course of a match as by the effort you put in, the last thing you want is a mercurial leader who keeps reacting to just the results and the narratives the said results lead to.

The way ahead is not drastic populist moves, but the more painstaking process of coming together of the selectors, the captains, the board and the coach to work out a way forward. As a bonus, they might all find some personal growth in the process.