Individual achievements will not be celebrated during his tenure as head coach. The latest glimpse of this principle came when India beat New Zealand by 96 runs to win their third T20 World Cup in the final here on Sunday. “I think my general philosophy with Surya (India’s T20 captain Suryakumar Yadav) has always been that success is not important. Trophies are not important,” emphasized Gambhir, who twice led his team to the ICC Global Finals.

He further said that we have been talking about success in Indian cricket for a long time. And I hope that as long as I’m there, we won’t be talking about successes.” Following this, the former Bharatiya Janata Party MP urged the cricket media to celebrate ‘trophies’ and not ‘achievements’. He repeated, “Stop celebrating your success, celebrate the trophy. This is important because the ultimate goal of team sports is to win trophies, not individual runs. It has never been important to me and never will be.”

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“I am very lucky that Surya and I share the same opinion, especially on this matter,” Gambhir said. No one is named but it is not difficult to understand which ‘workers’ he was talking about. It’s an open secret in Indian cricket that Gambhir has always felt that his knock of 97 in the 2011 World Cup final or his 75 in the 2007 T20 World Cup final has been underestimated.

In both cases, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s match-winning six (2011) and his masterstroke to give Joginder Sharma the last over (2007) became part of Indian cricket folklore. Gambhir referred to Sanju Samson’s innings in the Super 8s against the West Indies, in the semi-final and the final, saying that these knocks, almost like the quarter-finals, were the best example of how a team game is played. “You can see what Sanju has done in the last three matches. Not out 97, 89, 88 (89). Imagine if you were playing to reach a milestone, we might not have scored 250, so I think that goes for you too,” Gambhir said.

Gambhir’s views can be debated on many levels but there is no denying that in the last two seasons, his praise for India’s victories has dwindled and he has been criticized for failures almost every time. Criticism on social media also made his way difficult, but Gambhir doesn’t care about the opinions of outsiders. “My responsibility is not to any social media. My responsibility is mostly to the 30 people sitting in the dressing room,” Gambhir said.

“Though I have won two ICC trophies as a coach, it doesn’t matter because in future, I think those 30 people are the most important to me during my coaching tenure, no one else,” he said.