Former wicketkeeper Deep Dasgupta praised India’s T20I bench strength despite the team’s listless performance on the recent tour of UK.

Under new captain Shreyas Iyer, the Men in Blue lost the series 2-0 to Ireland and failed to win any of the four completed T20Is against England.

Amid the scrutiny, the reigning world champions bounced back emphatically to pull off a 3-0 T20I series against Zimbabwe in Harare.

While the performance in Zimbabwe was truly praiseworthy, India’s poor show in the UK will be reviewed by the BCCI in the coming days.

However, Dasgupta reckons the Indian team has enough talent pool to field two separate T20I side, with the only challenge being shortlisting the right combination.

"In the next one and a half years, the most important thing in the format will be to figure out what the combination is, and roughly speaking, what the best 15 is? At this time, if I say this, people might laugh at me, but factually we can make two teams, and chances will be that both teams will be equally good. So, that brings up a challenge, because we have 30 players, but to reduce it down to 15 players, that will be a challenge. We do have the players," Dasgupta said on his YouTube channel.

"I don't think anything has changed, and I feel that this team is a work in progress. Several people have asked me that what is going on with the Indian team? I tell them that most of the time, in the white-ball formats, especially T20Is, we don't know what the best playing XI is, or even the best 15. We don't know what combination suits us the best," he added.

Team India faced a hard time in playing the right combination on the tour UK, with injuries to key all-rounders like Hardik Pandya and Nitish Kumar Reddy. Moreover, Harshit Rana and Varun Chakaravarthy getting ruled out midway through the series didn’t help the cause.

As things stand, the Shreyas Iyer-led side has enough T20I scheduled for the coming months to work on their combination.