Former Indian captain Sunil Gavaskar has hit back at critics who pointed out that Team India enjoyed an unfair advantage in the ICC Champions Trophy 2025.
Team India played all their matches in Dubai as scheduled by the ICC before the start of the tournament. Teams who played against them had to travel from Pakistan to Dubai to play against them.
Since India played all their matches in Dubai, several former cricket experts as well as current cricketers opined that India were handed an unfair advantage by the ICC as they played all their matches at one venue.
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Sunil Gavaskar Brings England's Reference To Rubbish Claims On India's Unfair Home Advantage
However, Gavaskar completely rubbished such claims after India's win over New Zealand in the final and even namedropped the England cricket team in his response.
"Yes, there will be the carpers who talked about the advantage India had playing only at one venue and not having to travel between matches. However, that was decided by the ICC much before the tournament started, and any negative comment about that should have happened before the tournament's first ball was bowled. And if ‘home advantage' is the reason India won, then how come England, from where most of the whingers were, did not win ICC trophies till 2019 despite hosting it about half a dozen times earlier?" Gavaskar wrote in his column for Sportstar.
Gavaskar further said that the Rohit Sharma-led team won the tournament because they played brilliant cricket and he had a well-balanced team.
"India won simply because it had a well-balanced team, and at different times in the tournament, different players played a game-changing role in the team's win. Above all, there was the captaincy of Rohit Sharma, who, in winning two ICC titles as captain, has joined the incomparable MS Dhoni in winning multiple titles as skipper of the Indian cricket team. Rohit also squashed rumours about his impending retirement, saying he has not decided to retire from the format," he added.
India won their third ICC Champions Trophy title. The third CT title win came after a gap of 12 years. Rohit as captain has now won the T20 World Cup and the Champions Trophy besides having taken the team to four ICC finals.
