“That we never give up.”
Said Shubman Gill when Mike Atherton asked him what he had learnt about his team after the unbelievable late-stage heist that India pulled off on Monday. Showing up on the tense, overcast final morning of the fifth test, with England needing 35 and both its Jamies intact, few would have bet on the bowling side.
He was entirely allowed to be smug after stealing a historic win in London. But his faint, self-assured smile, accompanied with his famous dimples, didn’t stray anywhere beyond the boundary of composure. Speaking about the mindset that he brought out his team with, for the tense first session, he said, “Pressure makes everyone do things that they don't want to, and we just wanted to make sure that they’re feeling the pressure throughout.”
It was a gutsy statement—and even gutsier sense of self-belief—to imagine that 35 runs to get with four wickets in hand would create adequate pressure for England to crumble. It’s true that Chris Woakes—who has a test hundred and seven fifties—was minus his good arm from a shoulder injury earlier in the game, but England have chased down 370+ totals twice in the past three years against India. What would stop this bunch of Bazball exponents from getting it done with just a few hits to the fence?
“When bowlers like Siraj and Prasidh are bowling like that, even 35 runs is too much,” he continued during his post-match speech after the Oval test.
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He’s a month away from turning 26, but suddenly, Gill the leader seems equipped to shoulder the difficult burden of leading an Indian cricket team. For all the talk surrounding the flatter-than-usual pitches, the English bowling lacking bite with James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Mark Wood missing, the weather not deviously British—Gill had his task cut out. And what was it? To deal with the disillusionment borne after the end of firebrand former captain Virat Kohli’s leadership. India was blanked three-nil at home by New Zealand late last year and then the side came a cropper in the Border Gavaskar Trophy, a challenge they had miraculously aced the past couple of times.
If you look closely, it's not his mammoth tally—754 runs in the series (583 of which came in the first two tests), including three hundreds and a massive double hundred—that’s shone throughout. It’s Gill’s patience, his smiling acceptance of the game’s ebbs and flows and his serene, youthful marshalling of whatever talent he has in the ranks, that’s most impressive. It’s the mark of a leader who knows that with a game of such peculiarities that exist in cricket, not holding on too tightly is key.
“I think test cricket should be as it is. In my opinion, it is the most rewarding and satisfying format. You work the hardest to be able to get a win,” he noted in the post-match press conference after the final test at The Oval, ever the unassuming, articulate young strategist that he’s shaping up.
“And the best thing about this format is, it always gives you a second chance. If you keep working hard, doing the right things—there’s always a second chance,” continued Gill, every word out of whose mouth arrives in an unrehearsed, rapid cadence but still measured and meant. For someone who’s had a central part to play in 2020s IPL lore—having featured and headlined their dominance of the playoff stage (barring the 2024 season)—his reading of Test cricket’s syntax is something remarkable.
Bringing to England a team disembowelled of its anchor figures—Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane—was always going to be a challenging assignment. Even Jasprit Bumrah was scheduled to skip games for that much-dreaded term now: workload management.
In a closely fought series where the momentum has swung viciously from one end to the other, Gill has found moments of poise, grace and rhythm. This is not to say that he is unwilling to get under the skin of the opposition when needed (his graphic gesticulation exhorting English openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett to “grow some f***ing balls” will never get old). It’s to say that Shubman Gill doesn’t seem like someone who needs to frequently express his rawest emotions to drive him. It was something that worked for Kohli and Kohli’s India, but Gill seems to know his style is different. What’s even better is, he isn’t charting a different course just for the heck of being different. It’s also to say that after at least a decade of acclimating to emotions and drama as flavouring agent, the Indian fan has to unlearn that good performances can only come from a place of angry defiance.
Some might say India, who had the arsenal to win the series, regularly lost positions of advantage—like in Headingley, where, riding on five individual centuries, India asked England to chase 370+ and still lost the game. At Lord’s, the visitors failed to match England’s second innings total of 192 and Ravindra Jadeja’s marathon vigil came to an end in the unfortunate dismissal of Mohammed Siraj. But all along, Gill has maintained the composure he came to England on his first-ever tour as the Indian captain. And no, his run-in with Duckett and Crawley earlier in the game doesn’t quite count as an aberration.
At Leeds, as Mohammed Siraj and Prasidh Krishna tried without much success to prevent England’s batters from chasing down 370, Gill, stationed in the slip cordon, tried to raise the morale of the duo with a witticism that will feature in listicles to come. “On the one hand, there’s Mohammed—on the other, Krishna. Both gods,” yelled the captain as Krishna appeared to trouble Ben Duckett with an outswinger.
In fact, his unwavering belief in the pair of Prasidh Krishna, who hasn’t had the best of starts to his career so far, and Mohammed Siraj, whose vulnerability to emotion still gets the better of his vast talent sometimes, is a heartening aspect of his leadership. Even when he does have the services of a Jasprit Bumrah, who is literally increasingly diminishing into something of a rarity for the game, he doesn’t seem too complacent or reliant on that fact.
If all those qualities bring MS Dhoni to mind, it’s essential to not let the hugely limited success rate of the former captain in tests abroad put you off Gill. There are differences aplenty, beginning from Gill’s central role in the batting lineup that allows him to lead more with intention—like he did at Old Trafford, coming at none for two and compiling a draw-securing century. His psychological investment in the profitability of test cricket as a career instrument—over Dhoni’s short-term street-smarts and stubborn over-reliance on slower bowlers—renders him an overall more capable longer-format leader.
When did he get this good? Don’t know... All I’m saying is, India seems to be in good hands with Gill.