Shubman Gill sat at the head table, a gentle smile playing on his lips, indulgently fielding one question after another. Every time a query pertained to Mohammed Siraj, seated to his left with the Player-of-the-Match medal dangling proudly from his neck, the smile grew wider. Except once when he parroted a questioner by saying ‘Siraj bhai’, he refrained from using the Hyderabadi’s name. Just ‘he’ or ‘him’. True respect, Indian style? Where taking a revered person’s name is taboo?
Mutual admiration
That Gill has great respect for Siraj is no secret. It’s a respect that has grown over time; the duo has played a lot together, for India-A and for Gujarat Titans, where Gill is the captain and Siraj his principal battering ram. Gill and Siraj form a mutual admiration society. The skipper is in awe of his pacer’s ability to keep turning up, ball after ball, without losing discipline or intensity (a former England paceman asked this writer during the Oval Test, ‘Will it be okay if I shake his hand? Will he respond? He is just like a bowling machine, unbelievable.’). Siraj likes that he has his captain’s ear, that he can walk up and ask for and get fields without question.
It’s an alliance certain to serve Indian cricket with distinction going forward. The pair made its Test debut in the same game, on Boxing Day at the MCG against Australia in December, 2020 – Gill because Prithvi Shaw was dropped after the 36 all out meltdown in Adelaide, Siraj owing to the broken forearm sustained in the same game by Mohammed Shami which ended his interest for the remainder of the tour.
Shubman Gill and Mohammed Siraj celebrate the thrilling victory at The Oval.
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Both had series to remember, like the Indian team and Indian cricket itself. As an opener, Gill finished with 259 runs at 51.80 with two half-centuries, including a vital 91 in the second innings of the final Test at the Gabba, which India won to clinch an epic 2-1 series triumph. Siraj’s 13 wickets were the most for his country; like Gill, he too left his imprint in Brisbane with five for 73 in Australia’s second innings, the first of his five Test five-fors.
Gill has since gone on to greater things — not that Siraj hasn’t — culminating in the Test captaincy coming his way in May following the retirement of Rohit Sharma. At 25, he has the world at his feet, now more than ever following a tremendous 2-2 draw in England in one of the most storied Test series of all time. Siraj is older at 31, but he isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. With due respect to Jasprit Bumrah, he will remain Gill’s most potent and reliable weapon when India plays outside the continent, which won’t be for another 15 months when they travel to New Zealand for two Tests.
It wasn’t as if Gill was talking up Siraj at The Oval on Monday afternoon only because he knows how crucial Siraj will be going forward. It was just another example of a captain comfortable in his skin after just five games in charge, happy to share the credit around in his moment of collective and individual glory — he was also adjudged India’s Player-of-the-Series by England head coach Brendon McCullum, for 754 runs with four hundreds.
Gill conceded that he had been under pressure to prove himself with the bat at the start of the series. Since that maiden tour of Australia which was such a roaring success, the right-hander has struggled for impact whenever India have played outside Asia. In 18 innings between Brisbane 2021 and Headingley 2025, Gill had a highest of 36 in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean and England combined. His request for a drop down to No. 3 from the tour of the West Indies in July 2023, which won the nod of Rohit and then head coach Rahul Dravid, was proving to be a bit of a disaster with just two 30-plus tallies in 10 innings when he turned things around with 104 against England in Visakhapatnam. How much time would he take to settle in at No. 4, a position now vacant because of Virat Kohli’s retirement?
Despite Kohli’s very average run in Tests in his last five years, those were big shoes to fill. The shoes got even bigger when one considered who Kohli’s predecessor at No. 4 was for two decades – a certain Sachin Tendulkar, Test cricket’s most prolific run-scorer and century-maker. As if the pressure of having to correct a disturbing run of scores outside Asia wasn’t immense enough, Gill had to double-justify his place as India’s long-term No. 4.
Making a statement
No problem, the skipper announced with thunderous effect, backing up 147 in his first innings as Test captain and India’s No. 4 with 269 and 161 in the next game in Birmingham. After two Tests and four innings, he had a ridiculous 585 runs; his 430 runs at Edgbaston meant only Graham Gooch (456) had scored more runs in a Test. If ever there is something like a dream start…
It was impossible for Gill to match those standards for the duration of the series and there was an inevitable slump — just one score of more than 25 in his last six innings — but the one meaningful effort came in a match-saving cause in Manchester in the second innings of the fourth Test. His six-hour-19-minute 103, allied with K.L. Rahul’s 90 and unbeaten centuries by Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar, helped India negotiate 143 third-innings overs and come away with an honourable draw on which India built outstandingly with their series-levelling six-run heist at The Oval earlier in the week.
Shubman Gill notched up four hundreds in the England tour.
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Gill’s final tally might not have done justice to the numbers he had stacked up 40% of the way into the series, but 754 is hardly trifling. Among Indians, only Sunil Gavaskar (774, West Indies, 1971) has more runs in a single series; Gill also left Gavaskar behind for most runs by an Indian captain (the Little Master had made 732 against West Indies in 1978-79) while courting elite company alongside Gavaskar and Don Bradman for the most hundreds — four) by a captain in a Test series. Player-of-the-Series medal justified? Hmmm, maybe…
The bigger examination, though, was always going to be of his captaincy acumen. His man-management, sure, but also how he would handle his bowling resources. In many ways, because Bumrah was never going to be available for all five Tests, Gill was starting with one hand tied behind his back. No matter what, he would have had to field a different bowling combination in every game, which meant a constant revisit of plans, the lack of continuity a huge deterrent to Gill formulating an organic captaincy style.
Daunting proposition
For even a seasoned skipper to know right at the start of the series that he would not have his best bowler, who is also the top bowler in the universe currently at least, if not of all time, to fall back on in every single game is a daunting proposition. Gill must have wondered how he would cope when the time came. To his credit, he did a pretty good job of it. India winning both Tests in which Bumrah didn’t figure is a coincidence and no more than that, but without Bumrah, Gill was forced to dig deep into his reasonably limited experience of First-Class captaincy, and he wasn’t found wanting.
In the early stages, and particularly during the fourth innings of the first Test when England made a target of 371 appear reasonably miniscule, Gill wasn’t in his element. Far from it. First when openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett were flaying the bowling while adding 188, or later with Joe Root and Jamie Smith making merry, Gill looked a little lost and helpless, his cause not helped by his bowlers bowling on both sides of the wicket and making it impossible for him to set even run-denying fields. But by the end of the series, and especially towards the closing stages of the Oval classic on the final morning, he had found a method that he was most comfortable with.
Even to the last ball of the two overs in which Gus Atkinson was on strike with an injured Chris Woakes, his dislocated left shoulder in a sling, at the non-striker’s end, Gill chose not to bring the field in to deny Atkinson the single and therefore the strike at the start of the next over. His logic was simple — the ball was doing plenty and he’d rather keep the field out and force England to get the remaining 17 runs in singles rather than whittle down the target with a couple of boundaries, which were very much on if the field came in. One can argue with that line of thought, but at least a fair amount of thinking had gone into the approach that his bowlers and the captain himself were most comfortable with. “Any team in that position, there is always a lot of pressure on the batting team, because it’s a one-ball game to get a batter out,” Gill reasons, taking a cue from what he would be most uncomfortable doing in that situation as a batter.
The continued overlooking of left-arm wrist-spinner Kuldeep Yadav was a sore point, especially in the games where Bumrah didn’t play and because the pitches for most of the series wore a dry look, but in the final analysis, his faith in batting depth paid off. Gill isn’t unaware that his captaincy will be judged by the results, but he is losing no sleep over it. “When your decision go well, people obviously praise you; when they don’t go well, I am aware that there are going to be shots taken at me, which I am fine with,” he rationalises, “because at the end of the day, I know that I made a decision which was the best for our team.”
Should 2-2 be put down to beginner’s luck? Or is it the beginning of a new chapter in Indian cricket? Watch this space, shall we say?