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India captaincy

Shreyas Iyer got the T20I job on June 6, 2026, when the BCCI dropped Suryakumar Yadav after a rough IPL 2026 and a T20 World Cup campaign that never really took off. Iyer, who hadn’t played a T20I since December 2023, became India’s 15th captain in the format. It’s an odd kind of promotion. He wasn’t even guaranteed a place in the XI a year earlier.

The start was rough. India lost the opening T20I of his tenure to Ireland in Belfast, their first defeat to the Irish in nine meetings, and then lost the second as well to be swept 2-0. Iyer called the series “definitely not a great series” and admitted the batting group had failed to read the wickets. Things picked up slightly in England: a maiden T20I fifty in five years came in the rain-hit first match at Chester-le-Street, though India then lost the second T20I at Old Trafford to go 1-0 down in the five-match series. Three games remain, starting with the third T20I at Nottingham today.

So the early verdict on Iyer as India’s white-ball leader is hard to call. He’s captaining a team still adjusting to life after a T20 World Cup win, minus their previous captain, and the results so far don’t tell you much either way.

Tests and ODIs

Iyer doesn’t captain India in the other two formats. He made his Test debut in November 2021 against New Zealand and scored a century and a half-century in the same match, becoming the first Indian to do that on debut, but the leadership group in that format has never included him. In ODIs he’s the vice-captain, a support role rather than the top job, and it’s stayed that way through India’s 2023 World Cup final run and the 2025 Champions Trophy win, both of which he played a part in as a batter rather than as a decision-maker at the toss.

IPL captaincy

Delhi Capitals and Kolkata Knight Riders

Iyer’s first taste of IPL leadership came in April 2018, when Delhi Daredevils handed him the armband mid-season after Gautam Gambhir stepped down. He was 23. His first game in charge, he smashed an unbeaten 93 off 40 balls. Over the next few seasons, Delhi Capitals became a competitive side under him, reaching the playoffs repeatedly and, in 2020, their first-ever IPL final, which they lost to Mumbai Indians.

He moved to Kolkata Knight Riders in 2022, missed the whole of 2023 to a back injury, and came back in 2024 to lead them to the title, beating Sunrisers Hyderabad by eight wickets in the final. That made him the first captain in IPL history to take two different franchises to a final. He also became just the fifth Indian captain to win the tournament outright.

Punjab Kings

Punjab bought him at the 2025 mega auction for ₹26.75 crore, briefly the most expensive signing in IPL history, and named him captain straight away. It worked, at least by results: Punjab reached their first final in eleven years, topping the league table before losing by six runs to Royal Challengers Bengaluru. That made Iyer the only captain to lead three separate teams to an IPL final.

IPL 2026 didn’t go the same way. Punjab won six of their first seven games and looked like title contenders, then lost six straight. Iyer’s maiden IPL century, an unbeaten 101 against Lucknow Super Giants, snapped the slide and kept Punjab’s playoff hopes technically alive, but it came too late. They finished fifth and missed the playoffs entirely.

Domestic captaincy

Alongside franchise cricket, Iyer captains Mumbai in domestic tournaments when he’s available and fit, which hasn’t always been the case. He led the side to the 2024-25 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy title in December 2024, beating Madhya Pradesh in the final, which put him in a short list of captains, MS Dhoni among them, to have won two T20 titles in the same calendar year. The following Vijay Hazare Trophy campaign was less kind: Mumbai finished third in their group and didn’t make the knockouts.

A serious injury complicated things further. Iyer suffered a spleen laceration during an ODI against Australia in Sydney in October 2025 and needed hospital treatment, ruling him out for three months. He returned to competitive cricket in January 2026, stepping straight back into the Mumbai captaincy for the tail end of that season’s Vijay Hazare Trophy after Shardul Thakur, who’d led the side through the Ranji Trophy and Syed Mushtaq Ali campaigns, was ruled out with a calf injury.

Across nine IPL seasons, three franchises, a Ranji-playing state side and now the national T20I team, Iyer has captained more teams than most Indian cricketers get to lead in a lifetime. What he hasn’t done yet is settle into any one of those jobs long enough to be judged on it the way Dhoni eventually was. The KKR title in 2024 is the one clean success on the résumé. Everything else, three IPL final defeats and a T20I job barely a month old, hasn’t produced a result yet either way.

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