India played four completed T20Is against England. They did not field the same playing XI in any of them.
“Jos Buttler was out of form for a very long time, but England still backed him, and now he has scored a century, while we were playing musical chairs with the opening slot and dropped World Cup-winning hero Sanju Samson.”
Ravichandran Ashwin, Ash Ki Baat, July 12, 2026
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The numbers behind that comparison need to be stated plainly. Jos Buttler had not registered a T20I fifty since September 2025. He scored 131 runs across his previous 11 T20I innings before arriving in Southampton. At the 2026 T20 World Cup in March, he managed 87 runs across the entire tournament. England changed nothing. On July 11, Buttler scored 131 off 64 balls, the highest individual score ever made against India in T20 internationals. He and Harry Brook put on 233 for the second wicket in 103 balls. England posted 257/3 and won by 56 runs, completing a 4-0 series whitewash and displacing India as the world’s top-ranked T20I side.
Ashwin was precise about what India did across the same tour.
“We didn’t play a single match with the same playing XI on the whole tour.”
Ravichandran Ashwin, Ash Ki Baat, July 12, 2026
The sequence was this. Sanju Samson, who scored 321 runs at a strike rate of 199.37 across five innings to win the 2026 T20 World Cup Player of the Tournament, was dropped after scores of 5, 0 and 1 across Ireland and England. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi came in for the 2nd T20I and scored 14, 13 and 15 across his three matches. Then Sooryavanshi was dropped and Samson returned for the final match. India still lost by 56 runs.
Ashwin had already questioned Gambhir’s selection standards mid-series, but the Buttler comparison shifts the argument from an internal inconsistency to a documented contrast in outcomes. One management backed a struggling player. The other rotated theirs. The results are on the scorecard.
Samson had been left out of India’s Zimbabwe squad before the series was even over, with Prabhsimran Singh called up in his place. Gambhir told reporters after the Trent Bridge defeat that there was no rule preventing Samson’s return to the XI and that the conversation between coach and player would stay private. The BCCI has announced a review of the coaching staff after the ODI series ends on July 19.
Ashwin made these remarks on his YouTube channel Ash Ki Baat on July 12, 2026. Gambhir has not publicly responded to the Buttler comparison at time of publication.
Insider Read:
The point Ashwin is making goes further than it looks.
An opener’s preparation for a T20I is built entirely around certainty. The trigger movements against the new ball, the strokes committed to in the powerplay, the decision to go hard from ball one or read the conditions first: all of this is locked in during practice, built over days of knowing exactly what the job requires. When that certainty disappears, preparation changes. The batter is no longer preparing to bat. They are preparing to survive long enough to earn the next game.
Samson’s World Cup strike rate was 199.37. That number is only possible with complete freedom. It means committing to attacking strokes before the ball arrives, making high-risk decisions in real time on every delivery. You cannot play at 199 while calculating what a second failure will cost you. Those are two completely different mental states, and a batter can only be in one of them at the crease.
The Sooryavanshi data tells the same story from the other side. He scored 14, 13 and 15 in three T20Is — dropped after three innings, the same pattern as Samson. The rotation produced identical low returns from both players because the problem was not who was opening. A 15-year-old was sent in to face international seamers in English T20I conditions, on surfaces where the ball swings from the first over and hits the pitch hard, without settled preparation and knowing that one more quiet innings would cost him his place. That is not backing a player. That is audition cricket, and audition cricket produces audition batting: careful, risk-averse, and exactly the opposite of what T20 opening requires.
What England’s handling of Buttler delivers is not just one player’s century. Every player in that dressing room watched their management back someone who had scored 87 runs at a World Cup and made nothing across 10 months of T20 international cricket. When Buttler hit 131, nothing about that surprised Brook or Salt or Bethell. They already knew what their own bad run looked like inside that setup. They had watched it play out. The message received by every England batter was the same: “We know who you are. One rough patch will not change that.” That certainty is the environment that produces 257/3. The absence of it is what 76 all out looks like.
The difference between a player who attacks and one who defends is not always technique or ability. Sometimes it is simply whether they know they will be playing the next match.
Sources
- ENG vs IND, 5th T20I Match Report, Southampton, July 11, 2026 ESPNcricinfo
- Buttler T20I form and partnership stats ESPNcricinfo
- Gautam Gambhir, post-match press conference, 3rd T20I, Trent Bridge, July 7, 2026 ICC Cricket
