The Board of Control for Cricket in India's secretary Devajit Saikia has denied speculation that the Board has approached batting great V V S Laxman to take over as Team India's Test coach and replace Gautam Gambhir.
It is understood that within BCCI corridors, the jury is still out on whether Gambhir is the right person to remain at helm of the red ball team for remaining nine Tests of the World Test Championship 2025-27 cycle.
Having drawn 2-2 in a five-Test away series in England, India have a couple of overseas assignments comprising two Tests each against Sri Lanka in August 2026, and a tour of New Zealand in October, before hosting Australia for a five-Test affair in January-February 2027.
There were some unconfirmed reports that after India's abject surrender against South Africa in the two-Test series at home last month that BCCI had approached Laxman to check whether he would be interested in coaching the red ball team.
However, Saikia dismissed the rumours as 'speculation'.
"This is totally incorrect news going on. This is totally speculative news. Some very reputed news agencies are also flashing the news. There is no truth to it. BCCI straight away denies. People can think all they want, but BCCI
"This is somebody's figment of imagination; there is no truth in it, and I cannot say anything except that this is factually incorrect and baseless news."
While Team India has been doing extremely well under Gambhir in limited-overs cricket, lifting the ICC Champions Trophy and Asia Cup T20I edition in unbeaten runs, same cannot be said about Test cricket as under him, India has won just seven Tests and lost 10, drawing the other two.
As far as the series record is concerned: India started off well with a 2-0 series win against Bangladesh at home, but back-to-back setbacks against New Zealand and Australia (1-3 Border-Gavaskar Trophy loss away from home) lead to legends Rohit, Virat, and Ravichandran Ashwin hanging up their whites.
The 2-2 draw against England away from home, in one of the most gripping Test series over the years under leadership of a young Shubman Gill, followed by a 2-0 series win at home against West Indies did instill hope, before Proteas skipper Temba Bavuma, spinner Simon Harmer and pace all-rounder Marco Jansen chipped in with some of the best performances of the year to first deny India a chase of merely 124 runs at Kolkata and then inflict on them their biggest-ever Test loss by 408 runs. In both the Tests, India missed the services of skipper Gill, who went down due to a neck injury sustained just minutes into his batting stint at the Kolkata Test, with Rishabh Pant stepping in as captain.
But India did well enough to secure well-fought ODI and T20I series against Proteas by margins of 2-1 and 3-1 respectively, to make the home series a decent affair overall.
© 2026