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Sachin Tendulkar interview: What should Shubman Gill, Rishabh Pant, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudharsan and Karun Nair do to succeed in England Test series?
No batsman has scored a double hundred and a 150-plus score in the same Test match in the game’s 150-year-long history. Shubman Gill did that at Edgbaston. He did one better than the Aussie great Alan Border who had two 150s. No Indian batsman had scored 430 runs in a single Test. Gill went past Sunil Gavaskar’s run tally of 344 against West Indies in that storied Port of Spain Test in 1971.
On Saturday, cricketing history and folktales were being re-written by Shubman’s bat. So far in the series he had runs and the captaincy band, now he had an aura too.
India’s retired batting megastar Virat Kohli put out an Instagram post while Shubman was on field plotting and planning England’s fourth innings collapse. “Well played star boy. Rewriting history. Onwards and upwards from here. You deserve all of this.” By stumps on Day 4, aided by Shubman’s run spree, England, chasing 608 to win, were 72 for 3. It seems just a matter of a day that the Indian captain’s epic knocks get recorded in history as match-winning innings.
Virat’s ‘star boy’ was getting praise from the locals too. Former England captain Nasser Hussain said: “A hundred in the first Test, a double hundred and a hundred in the second. The Indian captain is in the form of his life. Gill has been chanceless and elegant in both innings.”
After the Indian captain was finally out, adding 161 to his 269 in the first innings, two young England cricketers, wicket-keeper Jamie Smith and frontline batsman Harry Brook, made it a point to acknowledge the batting greatness amidst them. Both in the 20s, they are Shubman’s contemporaries and had scored blazing hundreds in the Test themselves. Smith took his gloves off, waited for Gill to pass him and gave him a warm handshake. So did Brook, who ran across from the field and touched the peak of his England cap while extending his arm. India had designated Shubman as the heir apparent long back — now the world was doing it.
By single-handedly putting his team in winning position after the close defeat in the first Test, the new skipper had secured his position as leader in the dressing room. At Edgbaston, courtesy his two knocks that had gravitas of a Test match batting and chutzpah of T20 cricket, he had got the respect of his rivals and new fans abroad.
Till the last Test, which India lost, the broadcaster would keep playing reruns of Kohli’s innings after the game. During this Test, those old tapes have been moved to the archives since they have found a star capable of keeping the television set switched on even after the match hours. Shubman has the range of strokes to keep the connoisseur of the game, the Test match watchers, and even the casual watchers, there to fours and sixes, glued to their seats.
There was one stroke in the morning session that had even had the notoriously partisan Hollies stand letting out ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ and applauding. It was a full ball by Josh Tongue, the tall English speedster. Shubman knelt, like they do while proposing, and let his bat come down as smoothly as a waterfall and timed the ball perfectly. The ball crossed the cover boundary, but Shubman still retained his pose, giving enough time for the photographers to get that perfect frame.
In the day’s final session, he was again kneeling on left leg and hitting the spinners for sixes on the leg-side. Shoaib Bashir, the wily young off-spinner who foxed Rishabh Pant on Thursday, tempted the Indian captain by floating the ball. Confident about his batting, Shubman swung his bat and hit against the spin to send the ball in the stands. He hit 13 fours and 8 sixes in all. Unlike the previous Indian batting greats — Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli – Shubman caters to all tastes. Watching him is like being on a roller-coaster – Test one session, T20 the next.
Shubman at Edgbaston was growing in stature on the field and in the dressing room on this tour. Coach Gautam Gambhir and selection committee chief Ajit Agarkar have empowered him to take the tough selection calls. In the second Test, every cricket pundit wanted him to play the wrist spinner Kuldeep Yadav, but he went with all-rounder Washington Sundar. The ploy seems to have worked. Whatever Shubman touches these days turns gold.
But how has Shubman hit this purple patch after becoming the captain? Before this series his highest score in a Test was 128; here in England his four innings have scores 147, 269 and 161. The 25-year-old has said that before this series, he had been trying too hard to score runs but here on these scenic England grounds he has exhaled. “A lot of people say that when you focus too much, you sometimes miss your peak time. So, in this series, I tried to go back to my basics. I tried to bat like I used to in my childhood,” he said after his double hundred here.
By turning the clock back, Shubman has become the future of Indian cricket. The boy-to-man journey has happened by rekindling a boy’s love for batting.
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