The India batter is a game changer on his day but he needs to string more days like that together in Test cricket
Alagappan Muthu23-Jan-2024Shubman Gill has 1040 runs in Test cricket. Over half of them have come in boundaries.Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The team he will be up against over the next couple of months has adopted a style of play that more or less turns every single ball into an event, and they have won 13 of their last 18 Test matches, including one share of an incredible Ashes series last year.Even otherwise, a hallmark of orthodox batting is in keeping good balls out and pouncing on bad ones. India’s most recent No. 3s were extremely skilled at that. Gill, early though it is in his career, will be keen to match them. He has more ball-striking raw material than either Rahul Dravid or Cheteshwar Pujara did. He’s like a Ferrari. Except he keeps wanting to floor it. Even in traffic.Related
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Gill has faced 1753 deliveries in Test cricket. That averages out to 47.4 deliveries per innings. For perspective, Dravid averaged 109.29 balls per innings, and Pujara 92.14. Gill could offer so much more if he would just wait for the open stretch of road.In his previous two Test series – seven innings in West Indies and South Africa – Gill scored only 119 runs at an average of 19.83 with a high score of 36, even though he was dismissed in single figures only twice.It has become all the more vital that India find a new source of runs now that their most prolific batter in home Tests over the last decade is missing, and that doesn’t happen often. There was Kanpur 2021. Bengaluru 2018. And Dharamsala 2017. Then a couple of Tests before he had truly established himself in the side. That’s it. Virat Kohli has missed only five Test matches in India since making his debut. He averages 60 in those games, when the collective average of the top seven batters was only 35. India haven’t lost an edge. They’ve lost a battalion. So it’s up to the others to pick up the slack, which they are plenty capable of.Gill, for example, plays shots that feel straight out of a dream. The back-foot, high-elbow, half-jab, half-drive through midwicket for example. Balls that finish on top of off stump – maybe even slightly outside – at 139 kph from Mitchell Starc do not invite such disdain. But with Gill, it looked commonplace. He is enemy to bowlers, physics and geometry. So long as he stays at the crease.”It’s a matter of perception. Depends who you ask. I think Gill’s a fine player,” India coach Rahul Dravid said two days out from the first Test against England in Hyderabad. “Starting out his journey as a cricketer, sometimes you forget that it takes people a little bit of time. Some guys have success instantly. Actually he’s one of those guys. He’s done really well in some of his early tours, especially in Australia. To be fair to him and a lot of the young guys coming through, a lot of them have played on really challenging wickets, whether it’s in India or even overseas, over the last two-three years. It gets quite hard at times for some of these guys.””But he’s doing all the right things. He’s working really hard, he’s putting in the time, putting in the effort. His last season he got a couple of nice hundreds for us, one in Bangladesh, one in Ahmedabad. So I think he’s on the right track. Just hoping that over the course of this five-match series he has some big performances.Shubman Gill averaged 19 on the tours to West Indies and South Africa•AFP/Getty ImagesThere is no reason an attack-minded No. 3 can’t also be hard to dismiss. Ricky Ponting combined those two traits so well that there were times when it was almost impossible to get him to make a mistake. Indeed, those who were somehow able to – like Ishant Sharma or Andrew Flintoff – were accorded instant cult-hero status.It is, of course, patently unfair to stack Gill against a contender for the greatest of all time, but consider this. Gill has two centuries from his first 37 Test innings. Ponting had only three, and he went on to be unstoppable, at one point scoring 10 hundreds in 19 Tests. The Ponting of that era (2002-03) was defined by his conviction. And that is what Gill needs to distinguish himself. At the moment, he is running on pure instinct.”I think he is playing a bit too aggressively in Test cricket,” Gavaskar said of him a few days ago. He gets a signal that there’s a ball to attack and he just goes for it. But if he were to look at the bigger picture and devote more of himself to shaping the fate of a whole Test match instead of the odd delivery or two, well …Bazball pushes every opponent to their limits simply because England keep finding ways to put massive totals on the board. Keeping up with the runs they score becomes paramount and that puts the onus on India to dig deeper than they might normally do. For Gill, that means finding a way to last. Almost 38% of his Test innings have ended in fewer than 25 balls.That may well be a function of the way he sets up, staying leg side to allow a free flow of his arms. And while that in itself isn’t really a problem, he does complicate matters by trying to play at almost every delivery. Half of his dismissals (17) are a consequence of the fact that he rarely leaves the ball. Another 13 have been bowled and lbw. Granted, some of those were jaffas, like when Neil Wagner set him up to be caught behind in the 2021 World Test Championship final, and others just plain bad luck, like when Kagiso Rabada benefited from low bounce last month, but by and large the rest are a sign of a guy needing to tighten up a little bit. Perhaps his white-ball game, where throwing your hands at the ball is crucial to keep hitting sixes, has been seeping into his red-ball routine.”Gill is under pressure,” Sanjay Manjrekar told ESPNcricinfo ahead of the series. “Not just in Test cricket but in T20 cricket as well. I think there’s a crowd gathering around him, making his life a little difficult. Fifty-overs format, he is set for the moment. In Test cricket, there’s one imperative [thing] that you need, unless you’re batting down at No. 6 of 7, but even then you need it, especially with the kind of pitches that India have had in the recent past at home, where you need to have a good defence.”If you can’t defend, and you’re looking to attack your way out of trouble. That works in 50-overs cricket. T20 cricket it definitely works. In Test cricket, you need to have reasonably good defence and that is what he should be focusing on completely. His defence against seam, swing. Pace and bounce, he’s okay. And in India, against spinners, imagining a silly point, short leg and so on.”Imagine the series India will have if Gill sticks it out to thwart England’s plan A and B. If he makes them turn to C, D and E, to funky fields and golden arms, simply by being a little more strategic. Imagine the threat he will pose if he focused on innings-building as much as shot-making.That Shubman Gill will be a sight to behold too.