Pakistan men’s white-ball head coach Mike Hesson has conceded that India are comfortably the best side in world cricket, saying every team, and not just Pakistan, are struggling to overcome them.
The former New Zealand coach, who took charge of Pakistan’s white-ball teams in 2025, said India’s recent dominance puts Pakistan’s defeats to their arch-rivals into perspective.
The two teams have not played a bilateral series for over a decade due to political reasons, meeting only in multi-nation events, where India have enjoyed a prolonged winning run since 2022, including a hat-trick of wins at the 2025 Asia Cup and a 61-run thrashing at the 2026 T20 World Cup.
“In the Asia Cup last year, for example, we won every game except against India,” Hesson
told Cricinfo. “The reality is every single team in the world is struggling to beat India at the moment. Every team, not just Pakistan.”
Hesson believes Pakistan are judged disproportionately by their results against India, despite producing strong performances against the rest of the field.
“Rightly or wrongly, Pakistan are gauged by how they perform against India. And at the moment, India is not only the best team; they’re the best team by a mile,” he said. “At the T20 World Cup, we lost to England in the Super 8 off the back of a Harry Brook hundred and a very tight game outside of that. We won every [other] game except India,” he said.
Despite those results, Hesson maintained that Pakistan have improved under his tutelage.
“From 2023-2025, we didn’t make it out of the pool in ICC events. So you can’t go from eighth in the world to all of a sudden competing unless you start winning more regular games of cricket. And for us to go from winning 20-odd per cent to close to three-quarters of our games in a year is significant.”
India have won back-to-back T20 World Cups but seem to be caught in an awkward place where their batters are too reliant on IPL-like perfect pitches, which was exposed in a 2-0 sweep on the hands of an injury-hit Ireland.
