Over a transformative year, India’s chosen one has learned to find joy in the struggle
Alagappan Muthu02-Nov-20240:47
Manjrekar: Gill’s innings showed he cares for Test cricket
He walked off with the bat trailing in his wake, scraping the turf. A slow climb up the Wankhede Stadium stairs took him into the dressing room. It was the last place he wanted to be in.Shubman Gill was playing the kind of innings that makes a top-order batter. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t scratchy. It wasn’t a hundred. It wasn’t easy. But it was so very necessary.Related
Wankhede was a beautiful setting for it, with its capacity to be many things at once. It can be loud. Akash Deep flattening Tom Latham’s stumps just before tea on Saturday infused drama and intrigue into an atmosphere that is only supposed to contain nitrogen, oxygen, and trace amounts of other gases. It can be dead. Virat Kohli running himself out on Friday evening rendered the vocal cords of 18,724 people obsolete. It can be hostile. Earlier this year, it made Hardik Pandya want to cry.Mumbai woke up to a post-Diwali haze so thick that whole buildings were lost in it. Rishabh Pant decided he would do the same to the memories of India’s mini-collapse from the evening of day one, belting Ajaz Patel all around the park and preventing him from getting into any sort of rhythm. The runs were a bonus. The quickest fifty by an India batter against New Zealand in Test cricket was a bonus. The objective was to prevent the spinner from hitting the good-length area of a turning pitch.Step out, make room, go inside-out: just one example of Shubman Gill’s range against spin•BCCIGill wasn’t really at his best doing this. A habit of going at the ball with hard hands made him especially vulnerable on the front foot. If New Zealand could get him forward but deny him the half-volley, there was enough help on offer to expect a favourable outcome. Ajaz managed that in India’s 22nd over, the third of the morning session, but the bat-pad went to silly point and there was nobody there. Gill used to find himself in this situation a lot and his average against spin reflected it. Until the start of 2024, it was 33.33. After the first Test against England earlier this year, his place in the XI even came under threat.The ball after he had nearly landed in trouble against Ajaz, Gill showcased some of the gains he has made since that low point. He went down the track – he’s spoken about doing that to counter spin ever since he was a little boy – but there was a little bit more at play too. Something clever. Something that good batters try to do to put the pressure back on the bowler. He had shifted himself inside the line of the ball and made full use of the opportunity to free his arms. He did this and went inside-out over extra-cover for four.There were other examples of his evolution as well. A forward-press trigger movement. Softer hands while defending. A focus on strike rotation. Because boundaries are often just a reprieve, a second’s joy amid hours of struggle, in conditions offering at least four degrees of turn on average. That is Test cricket, and Gill is showing the capacity for it. He had to be woken up to these things after a dropped catch on 45, but when he was, he did everything he could to shut the bowler out. Sometimes he was successful. Sometimes he was not. He rolled with that. And in the end, he was pretty happy with where he ended up.”Yes, definitely it’s one of my better knocks that I have played in Test cricket,” Gill said at the press conference on Saturday, and explained how he has been trying to get better at playing spin.”I was injured in the first Test. Even leading up to that Test I didn’t really practice that much because of the injury. So, I didn’t get that much time in the nets. And before the Pune Test match, I got two net sessions, and I am the kind of person, I like to have long practice sessions so that I feel confident about it. So, just the conversation with the coach [Gautam Gambhir] was just having more repetitions on what I think is the best idea for me to be able to play spin.1:23
Manjrekar: The way Pant started against Ajaz was incredible
“Leading up to this Test match, [my training] was all about me working on the areas that I have worked before,” he said. “The England series that we played, I think when I was batting in that series, I was batting at my best against spinners and just to be able to go back into that mindset and what my positions were while playing spinners and that’s what I was trying to replicate before this match.”Since the start of this year, Gill has averaged 61.55 against spin.Having been anointed the chosen one, the future of India’s batting, the future captain, there had been a sense that things were coming easy to Gill; that the narrative being built around him was disproportionate to what was on his CV. He obviously has no control over that. He also can’t really avoid that. The best he can do is be ready for games like these where his team was behind and they went through a series of brain fades and then had to fight back. Because such times hit different.”I was just having fun,” Gill said. “Even if it was difficult, I was just enjoying the difficult moments because you don’t get to play that many Test matches and I just feel when I am batting there, if I would put too much pressure on myself then I am losing out on the fun of the art of batting and that’s what I was trying to do.”It was fun for Gill, and fun too, judging by its response, for the Wankhede.