With Rohit Sharma as captain and Rahul Dravid as coach, India had abandoned its ‘safety first’ approach with bat in limited-overs cricket. It paid off as they finished runners-up in the 2023 ODI World Cup and winners of the 2024 T20 World Cup.

“One hundred percent,” said ten Doeschate, when asked if playing fearless cricket was part of the team philosophy. “I think that shows in the way we played. The Test match in Kanpur is a good example of that.”

“We’re trying to push the boundaries of what we can do as a team,” said ten Doeschate. “We clearly have the quality to do it. And then it’s about giving the players the belief to do it in a safe space, that if it doesn’t go well, it’s OK. And even if you look back at the first two games, someone like Sanju (Samson) who got a fast start in the first game in Gwalior, it would have been easy for him to turn it around and just get a 50-60 but not out But you can see that he was trying to push the line. He knows the state of the game, and the messaging is pretty consistent with that.

“We want the boys to expand their game. We want to take cricket forward, like it’s moving with the times. And we want to be prepared for the big crunch moments that will happen over the next 18 months.”

Another change since Gambhir became coach was the push to get as many players as possible into the side bowl. In the second T20I, despite Hardik Pandya not rolling his arm, India used seven bowlers, each of whom picked up at least one wicket.

“You see how the game goes. It’s rare that all five bowlers, or even six bowlers, go well on a given day,” ten Doeschate said. “So it’s nice to have options. Ideally you want them to bowl a bit more, but someone like Hardik not bowling in the last match is just a testament to the depth of bowling in the team.”

India played the same XI in the first two T20Is. But now that the series has been sealed, they will likely try their hand at benching.

“That was always the plan,” says ten Doeschate. “Obviously there’s a nice depth in the squad – a lot of guys have IPL experience. We’re trying to expose as many guys as possible to international experience with what we have in store. So someone like Harshit Rana, we’d like to It is clear that Tilak (Varma) came into the selection a little later. We want to give Sanju another chance, so there are options.”

The third and final T20I will be played in Hyderabad where the average run rate in IPL 2024 was 10.54. But Ten Doeschate said India would not blindly trust the data.

“Certainly, the data and the evidence is around that (a high-scoring game). But a bit like when we got to Delhi recently, you don’t want to read too much into the data. We probably feel that those first three wickets which we lost maybe because we were going a little too fast. The wicket was a bit sticky.

“So we will look at this wicket. We are aware of the high-scoring nature of this pitch during the IPL, but we are also now five months away from the IPL. So conditions could also change. Fingers crossed, it’s a high scoring game and a quality game.”