The record which took 29 months to make… Shreyas Iyer lost it as soon as he became the captain, shameful record attached to his name

New Delhi. In the game of cricket, when a player takes over the captaincy of his team, his dream is to start with a memorable victory. But the story was completely opposite with Indian batsman Shreyas Iyer in Belfast. As soon as Shreyas Iyer came on the field as captain in the T20 International match against Ireland, not only the responsibility of making the team win was on his shoulders, but there was also the pressure of maintaining India’s victory chariot which seemed invincible for the last two years. But, as fast as the statistics change in this shortest format of the game, history also changes at the same speed. Shreyas Iyer became the next captain of India to taste defeat in the very first match of his captaincy, and with this many big records of Indian cricket were also reduced to rubble.

The history of Indian cricket is witness to the fact that the crown of captaincy does not always bring the gift of victory for everyone. Shreyas Iyer is not the first captain to join this unwanted club. Even before him, many veteran and young players of India had to face defeat when they took command of the team for the first time in T20. Now Shreyas’s name has also been added to this list. When Virat Kohli, one of the greatest batsmen of modern cricket, came to Kanpur as a full T20 captain for the first time in 2017, England had spoiled the beginning of his journey by defeating India.

Rishabh Pant’s captaincy started at the home ground Arun Jaitley Stadium, but the strong South African team dwarfed India’s mountain of runs and defeated Pant in his very first match. When the Indian youth team went on the Zimbabwe tour under the leadership of young sensation Shubman Gill, in the very first match at Harare, the host team spoiled Gill’s captaincy debut by causing a major upset. Now a new name of Shreyas Iyer has been added to this list, where the Indian team looked helpless in front of the tactics of the Irish team on the pitches of Belfast.

The invincible journey of 29 months has come to an end
This defeat was not just the defeat of one match, but it also ended the dominance of the Indian team which had been going on continuously since January 2024. India had won 12 consecutive T20 International series since January 2024. During this time, the biggest teams of the world were kneeling before India. Before this, the last time India was able to draw a series 1-1 against South Africa was in December 2023, just before January 2024, that is, it could not win it.

From then till now, Team India was running invincible. But with this defeat in Belfast, it was decided that this would be the first time after January 2024 that India would fail to win a T20 series. This one defeat put a break on India’s golden streak of 12 consecutive series wins.

ireland’s historic conch shell
On the other hand, this story is as much about the heartbreak of the Indian team as it is about the day written in golden letters for Irish cricket. This victory was like a dream come true for Ireland. The Irish team, which had lost all its previous 11 attempts against India in any format of cricket (9 T20 and 3 ODI), finally defeated India in its 12th attempt. Ireland has now become the 11th team in the world which has defeated India in international cricket. Not only this, Ireland has so far achieved the distinction of defeating a total of 8 full member countries on the map of international cricket. Now there are only three big forts left in world cricket which Ireland has not been able to conquer yet, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.