Boria Majumdar in Leeds
In 1996, a 23-year-old Sachin Tendulkar, then India’s No. 4 and captain-in-waiting, led the way at Edgbaston on a wicket that was very difficult to bat on. His colleagues hardly offered any support to the master, who stood tall and made a telling statement in the second innings. It was an innings of pure class. Against an attack that had Dominic Cork and Chris Lewis bowling superbly well, Tendulkar was the lone warrior with a majestic hundred. India were bowled out for 219, with Tendulkar scoring 122 of them.
Even Tendulkar, when he thinks back to that innings of his, would be proud of what Shubman Gill did on his Test-captaincy debut at Headingley today. Coming out to bat at 92-2, Gill looked in the groove from the start. His driving was sublime, his cuts played with precision and his composure just unbelievable. He walked the talk as skipper, and surpassed the highest score by an Indian captaining for the first time, a record previously held by Virat Kohli, who had made 115 (and 141) at the Adelaide Oval in 2014.
Many had said in the build-up that Gill was plain lucky. He hadn’t scored in SENA countries, and this captaincy was a call based on potential rather than performance. Gautam Gambhir, the man who asked Gill to bat at No. 4, must be having a quiet laugh at the end of the day. It was at his insistence that Gill dropped down from 3 to 4.
Except for the run-out opportunity when he was on 1, the innings had no blemish. Maybe it was nerves when he called Yashasvi Jaiswal for a very risky run. Ollie Pope had two-and-a-half stumps to aim at and got it wrong. He handed Gill four extra runs, and the captain was on his way. Thereafter, it was sublime Shubman. Pleasing to the eye, and all elegance and grace personified. Even when Jaiswal got out, he looked unflustered. India needed another partnership, and that’s what the captain made sure India got, in tandem with a resolute Rishabh Pant.
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For the last three decades, the No. 4 position in the India team had rested with Tendulkar and Kohli. While Tendulkar made it his own for a good two decades, Kohli, the heir to the master, had it with him for more than a decade. There are 81 Test hundreds between them and over 25,000 runs. The enormity of what Gill was stepping into may not have dawned on him till this morning. Or if it had, he wasn’t showing it.
This is one position that has been controlled by batting royalty. If Tendulkar was the greatest Test batter after Sir Donald Bradman, Kohli was certainly one of the best of this generation. Gill has seriously big boots to fill, but going by his body language, he did not seem overawed. Rather, he looked like he was ready to embrace the challenge, and that augurs well for him and for India.
In fact, at no point today did he look under pressure. Nor was he in any hurry. He answered all the questions the English bowlers posed to him, and it was as if the captaincy was an inspiration rather than a burden. Maybe that’s why he had said at the pre-match press conference, “There is no bigger or better honour than to captain your country in red-ball cricket. I am privileged to have been asked to lead India in Test cricket.”
True to his words, he stood up to the challenge, and in doing so, made sure that his team held the aces in this Test match at the end of day 1.
Also Read: Jaiswal lays down marker with magnificent hundred