India’s fantastic performance in the current Champions Trophy 2025 has spurred suggestions that the Rohit Sharma-led team has an ‘advantage’ since they are playing at only one place and have a better understanding of the conditions than other teams. According to the Hybrid Model, India will be playing all their tournament matches in Dubai whereas the remainder of the games will be spread across three cities in Pakistan.
In addition to not needing to travel, players like Pat Cummins, Rassie van der Dussen, Michael Atherton, and Nasser Hussain among others have stated that the Indian team benefits from all their matches being at one location.
Gautam Gambhir, head coach of India, has criticized ‘perpetual cribbers’ and said that Dubai is a neutral venue for his team as well as for others; he cannot remember the last tournament they played at this ground.
Following India’s victory over Australia in the Champions Trophy semifinal on a Tuesday night, Gambhir said during a press conference that there is much controversy over the unfair advantage. Still, just what is an undue advantage? Above all, this is as much a level playing field for us as it is for any other team. I can’t recall the last time we played in this venue.””
“Even for a day we haven’t been used here.” We trained at the ICC Academy. One eighty degrees apart are the situations there and here. Sometimes people are always cribbers. As such, I believe we lacked any unfair advantage,” he included.
India stocked their team with spin bowling alternatives, but Gambhir argues it was not a preplanned action and that their spin bowling corps consists of just two specialist spinners while the others are allrounders.
We’ll go for two spinners since this is a tournament on a subcontinent, therefore, the plan was that in a 15-member squad, anywhere else we play in Pakistan or anyplace else, we’ll pick two spinners. Therefore we had not planned on using any spinners. Gambhir stated, “If you look at it, we’ve only played two or three spinners in the last two matches and the rest were all all-rounders.
