Captain Gill

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Melbourne, 2020. The ball is leaving Shubman Gill’s bat with a sound that belongs to a different century, maybe even a different profession. It’s the kind of crisp you might have heard slipping through the doors of Studio Two at Abbey Road, as Ringo Starr was recording the drum tracks for Sgt. Pepper’s.¹ But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to where the montage begins.

The 2018 Men’s Under-19 World Cup was supposed to be a closely-fought tournament between the brightest young talents in the world. In theory, at least. Instead, it became a procession for Rahul Dravid’s boys. They weren’t playing cricket so much as conducting a clinic - think All Blacks at their most imperious, think Barça Femení turning La Liga into their personal playground. The bowlers, all cheekbones and sinew, somehow conjured 85mph rockets from frames that looked like they’d snap in a strong breeze. Ian Bishop and Simon Doull, men who’ve forgotten more about pace bowling than most will ever know, were gasping for words in the commentary box. The ICC, dizzy with the prospect of viral content, cut video montages for the India team alone.

And yet, even amidst that constellation of future internationals, Shubman Gill could be spotted from a mile away. The frame helped - he was tall, very tall, and the typical kind of teenage-lean that gets dieticians to add thirty extra grams of protein per day. But, amazingly, he didn’t seem to need muscle at all. His toothpick arms were wielding the bat like a brush. His bat moved minimally, in neat shapes, not travelling an extra inch. While his pals were using their speed and power to pummel bowlers, Shubman was patting and tapping them for fours and sixes.

The shot that lives rent-free in my head - as vivid as last night’s basil chicken, and considerably more nourishing - came in the semi-final against Pakistan. A bouncer, the kind that makes honest batters duck and aggressive ones unleash violence. Shubman simply stood tall, let it come. Then, with the nonchalance of someone adjusting a photo frame, he redirected it for four over his shoulder.

Captain Prithvi Shaw was the toast of the nation when India won. Four Ranji Trophy centurie for Mumbai before he could legally drink, spoken of with sparkling eyes. The next this, the future that. The national selectors fast-tracked him; they were always going to.

The postscript from the experts’ corner had a twist: Shaw was the bold headline, but Gill was the story.

The following months revealed just how deep the Gill waters ran. He first took apart those for whom Ranji Trophy was the summit. Then came the bright young things, the IPL hopefuls with their variations and dreams. Finally, inevitably, came the royalty - your Ashwins, Jadejas, and Shamis. All received the same treatment: elegant dismemberment, performed without perspiration, without a hair slipping from its appointed place. I often found myself wondering: do those hands even form calluses? Or does the bat simply know better than to leave a mark?

Melbourne validated what we suspected, Sydney sealed the conversation. A week later, the 91 at Brisbane. An impossible knock, an exhibition of ferocity and audacity dressed in velvet, setting up an impossible Indian win.

We projected the numbers. Eight thousand Test runs, minimum. Maybe ten. The only question was how quickly. His age fell favourably too - his peak would overlap the gradual descent of a great Indian batting lineup. Maybe, if things fall into place - as they usually do for God’s favourites like him - the captain’s throne will be his to take.

On June 20, 2025, at Leeds, Shubman Gill will slip his arms into the India Test captain’s navy blue blazer. The thirty-sixth man to wear it. The blazer weighs more than wool and thread should - it carries Pataudi’s audacity, Wadekar’s defiance, Ganguly’s fire and Kohli’s chutzpah. For a nation with cricket coursing through its veins, it’s less garment and more a cardinal robe.

Tim Wigmore opens his new book, Test Cricket: A History, with a sharp truth. “Test cricket is the most brutal game.” He explains how football offers miracles - one moment can decide a game. The shorter formats of cricket compress time, giving David the chance to trip Goliath and run away. But Test cricket is where your stripes cost sweat. Five days, two innings each, nowhere to hide. The weak might sparkle for a session, shine for a day, but gravity, that heartless devil, always wins.

At 25, Gill is India’s youngest Test captain since Sachin Tendulkar, and the fifth youngest ever. Trace your finger through India’s captaincy lineage and you’ll find destiny and natural progressions. Heirs apparent ascending to obvious thrones. And then there’s Gill. Dropped in Melbourne five months ago. Eighteen Test innings outside Asia since that Brisbane masterpiece and not one score higher than 36. A Test average that’s belies all his gold-streaked talent.

The selectors see what they need to see: ability so rare it deserves its own adjectives. With such gems, you persist and you persist some more. But they also see someone who seemingly has an eye for the details. Last year, after a gruelling home Test series, coach Rahul Dravid faxed his notes to the selectors: Gill has leadership potential. But this potential, even with Dravid’s nod, exists in thin air, without ample corpus to verify the theory. At last week’s press conference, when asked about Gill’s absence of leadership experience - not just at this level, at any level - chief of selectors Ajit Agarkar chuckled. “He’ll have to learn on the job.”

In January 2021, many of us would’ve nodded along to prophecies of Captain Gill, seen it written in the stars. In October 2024, that opinion would’ve ended up on Twitter, garnished with a screenshot and a name freshly plucked from Delhi’s famous vocabulary.

The circumstances around Gill’s promotion contribute to the smog. Consider the last six months. India sat atop the World Test Championship table. Bangladesh dispatched 2-0. New Zealand sized up for a similar dismantling. The Kiwis hadn’t won a Test in India since 1988.

Then: three straight losses like slaps to the face; flight to Australia; Bumrah leads, bowls, wins; Rohit returns from paternity leave and drops Gill; Rohit can’t buy a run with a blank cheque; he “opts out” of the Sydney Test; then delivers an impassioned mid-match sermon about knowing what’s best for the team, how he’s “not going anywhere”; India limp home; the selectors have hushed conversations with the “seniors”; a podcast appearance discussing the England tour and that mouth-watering bowling attack of Bumrah, Siraj, and Shami; and then, out of nowhere, Rohit announcing his retirement via an Instagram story; Kohli following suit within days; pandemonium; panic; the captaincy lottery down to three names; dice rolled - Shubman Gill.

Even by Indian cricket’s soap opera standards, that’s an year’s worth of drama compressed into a few breathless months.

Now, check out the squad for England: no Rohit, no Pujara, no Kohli, no Rahane, no Ashwin, no Shami. That’s all your pillars from the last decade gone, leaving behind only scaffolding and Jasprit Bumrah.

Sid Monga, writing with typical clarity, brings out the oddity in the timing of it all. “There’s never a perfect time for such a leadership change. In hindsight, the selectors should perhaps have appointed Gill as vice-captain during the Bangladesh Tests last year. He would have had an apprenticeship of two home series.”

Should have, could have. The most useless words in cricket.

The mess has its mercies. The label of India’s Test captain places you at the front and centre of its cricket, and, by extension, the centre table of world cricket. Shubman won’t need to dress up for that just yet. Not with Rohit and Virat still prowling the ODI circuit, not with Suryakumar Yadav leading the T20 team. Even in Tests, the superstar and talisman of the team is Jasprit Bumrah. For once, an Indian captain might actually get to learn his trade in relative shadow.

I’m watching the Gujarat Titans play the Mumbai Indians in an IPL eliminator. Gill’s boys against the heavyweights. He’s led well this season, carrying the same sweatless demeanour he brings to batting, all measured movements and calculated risks. The tactical brain ticks along nicely, proactive rather than reactive.

But the tense air of a knockout game reveals a different side. Rohit Sharma and Johnny Bairstow are taking his bowlers to the cleaners, and suddenly, Gill’s composure starts fraying at the edges. Field changes every ball, frantic gestures, men moved from here to there. Bairstow seems in on a cruel joke, finding the exact spots Gill vacates.

I’m overreading, obviously - what else to do when the sample-size is this small?

But, amidst all the chaos, there’s a moment of warmth: after Rohit Sharma gets dropped a second time, Gill walks over to an irate Mohammed Siraj, hand on shoulder, voice low, leading him back to his mark. It’s tender, almost. We’ll need a lot of this in the summer, when England’s Red Bull-high batters kick into gear.

I’m squinting, searching for clues, breadcrumbs that could point me towards the brand of cricket Gill likes his team to play. Is there such a thing called GillBall? His Gujarat Titans team is built around a deep bowling attack, but that could well be influenced by the franchise head coach, Ashish Nehra. There is nothing in his BCCI interviews either.

Not that Gill needs to have a distinct colour palette, but I hope he moulds his team in a cast of his choice. If he’s smart - everything suggests he is - he’ll steal the one trait both Kohli and Rohit shared: an almost carnal desire for wickets. Kohli famously flipped his team on its head to pack it with bowlers. Rohit, less dramatically but no less decisively, kept the artillery loaded. All of Test history will tell you, bowlers maketh a team.

The comparisons are already streaming in. An infographic tells me that Virat Kohli, at his moment of promotion, had a similar Test average as Gill today. What it conveniently, smartly conceals: Kohli was already ODI and T20 royalty by then, had enough Test cricket behind him that selectors could ignore the recent catastrophes. More importantly, Kohli was born to lead - you could see it in how he carried that Under-19 World Cup team, how he naturally occupied the centre of a frame even as a kid amongst first team legends.

Actually, Gill’s story rhymes better with Graeme Smith’s. In 2003, Smith was made captain of the South African Test team at the age of 22, after having played a meagre 8 Tests. Forget a CV, he didn’t even have a pamphlet.

South Africa was bleeding then. The match-fixing scandal had gone from Delhi Police allegations to Hansie Cronje weeping before the King Commission.² Two years later, Cronje was dead, plane scattered across the Outeniqua Mountains. Another year later, South Africa fumbled a home World Cup they were supposed to dominate.

Indian cricket is in a far better space, of course. No scandals flying about, only Instagram stories and algorithms liking pictures of models. But debris is debris. Home thrashing, away thrashing, three titans walking into the sunset. Sometimes, reconstruction starts from rubble.

And reconstruction will pretty much be the logline for Gill’s first year as commander-in-chief. The selectors have placed him and coach Gautam Gambhir in charge of building the next iteration of the Indian Test team. Alongside finding players to fill the craters left by Rohit, Kohli, and Pujara, they will have to find replacements for Ashwin, Mohammed Shami, and soon, Ravindra Jadeja. And, most critically, they’ll have to find a way to befriend Jasprit Bumrah’s back muscles.

These days, Test teams work in two-year cycles thanks to the World Test Championship. The horizon for India looks gloomy, if not dark. There is a long tour to England in the summer, and another smaller one to New Zealand late next year. Even at home, Australia and South Africa will come calling, and they won’t be bringing flowers.

Gill will have some tailwind. Expectations will be adjusted for reality. The board knows, the selectors know - hell, everyone knows - that this transition couldn’t have come under worse weather. They’d just want to see a team that throws punches, lands a few, stays standing. Sometimes that’s enough to begin with.

And so we arrive at the second reconstruction, the one nobody writes about in the magazine cover stories. The first is obvious - find players, win matches, don’t embarrass the jersey. The second is far tougher, in a way: convince a generation raised on Instagram reels that five-day cricket isn’t just a boomer hobby.

Look, Test cricket exists in a perpetual existential crisis. We’ve been hearing about its apparent demise for decades. But, this time, the numbers are alarming, even if not completely shocking. A recent survey by the World Cricket Association revealed that less than half of the current professionals consider Test cricket as the pinnacle of the sport. That number used to be 86% just a few years back.

The viewership graph has begun to reflect this change too. The newer audience, weaned on franchise cricket’s sugar rush, increasingly views Test cricket as a dusty grandfather clock in a room with French windows and wooden flooring.

Gill’s first interview as Test captain reveals a few things. He speaks of his desire to excel in Test cricket, credits Kohli, Rohit, and Ashwin for inculcating a love for white clothing. He speaks about the “mental and physical challenges” of long Test tours, and how they excite him most. Music to the fan’s ears, violins in minor key.

Revitalising an entire format is obviously above Gill or any single person’s paygrade. But how he builds this team, how he makes them play, whether they inspire or merely exist - all of it feeds into whether India, the sport’s gravitational centre, can help keep Test cricket on its pedestal.

Shubman Gill has become the India Test captain through circumstance. He seems calm and confident, but there will be a tempest brewing within him. Even we need time to adjust our eyes, to see him leading the team out without doing a double-take. But, he’s just 25. The horizon is endless.

First things first: he has to rediscover that painter who drew masterpieces in Christchurch and Melbourne and Sydney. He’s far too gifted to be averaging in the mid-thirties. And then he must build a gallery’s worth of work, become the bulwark for the Indian batting lineup. Anything less, and it will start showing on his leadership, which is the cliff from where the slope only goes one way. This unforgiving job doesn’t need the cabin baggage of anxiety and insecurity.

Watch Shubman Gill bat, and you sense that he has an extra half-a-second compared to everyone else. In his new role, which can very quickly become suffocating, Gill will often need to take that half-a-second’s breath, even if just to tell himself that he belongs.

The blazer falls a bit awkwardly for now, but hopefully, not for too long.

1. I may have overused this metaphor. Or maybe not.

2. April 2025 marked twenty-five years since India woke up to confirmation that a part of their heart was being bartered by those they worshipped. Nice time for an essay?