Asia Cup 2023: The consistency of Shubman Gill, who scored his fifth ODI hundred this year

India's Shubman Gill celebrates scoring a century during the Asia Cup cricket match between Bangladesh and India in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Friday, September 15, 2023. (Photo: AP)

“Shubman Gill? Wow!”

Those were Chandika Hathurusinghe’s first reactions when I asked him about the Indian opener’s brilliant century against Bangladesh at the Asia Cup. Sitting in the opposition dugout as the head coach, what was the one thing about Gill that stood out for him, I wanted to know.

“Interesting that you should ask me that question,” the former Sri Lankan opener replied. “I was asking some of our younger batsmen the very same thing. He picks the length so early, it gives him so much more time to play the ball. The strokes and the range, just wow.”

Hathurusinghe played for Sri Lanka for eight years in the 1990s, and one of his teammates was Aravinda de Silva, arguably the finest batsman to come out of his country. For him to go gaga over Gill reiterated the class and quality of the young man who has worked his way to No. 2 in the ICC rankings for One Day International (ODI) batsmen.

The players themselves don’t attach a lot of significance to the rankings, which are dynamic and sometimes change arbitrarily. But no one is in any doubt about Gill occupying the top echelons of the sport currently. This has already been a year of plenty for the 24-year-old from Fazilka in Punjab; if he can reprise his heroics of the first eight and a half months during the seven weeks of the World Cup in October-November, India will have a glorious shout at regaining the World Cup.

From the time he started opening the batting in ODIs in December 2020, Gill has been remarkably consistent but since the dawn of 2023, he has redrawn the contours of 50-over batsmanship. In 17 innings this year, he has amassed 1,025 runs at a remarkable average of 68.33 and a wonderful strike-rate of 103.32. These are exceptional numbers even in a day and age where scores are becoming taller in most parts of the world, but they don’t even begin to do justice to the felicity and oomph of his subliminal batsmanship.

Beyond the ability to pick length quickly that Hathurusinghe referred to, Gill’s strengths are his deep rooting in the basics of batting, his balance, his stillness at the crease, his game and situational awareness and an immense self-belief stemming from supreme confidence in his abilities. He also has the hunger and the ambition that prevents him from resting on his laurels. Minutes after his stellar 121 wasn’t enough for India to cross the line against Bangladesh, Gill castigated himself for not getting the job done. It didn’t matter to him that of his colleagues, only one other batsman topped 30; pleased as he was to have mastered tricky conditions, his disappointment at letting the team down came as an eye-opener. This man doesn’t get easily satisfied.

Gill has four ODI hundreds this year, including a blazing 208 against New Zealand in January. He is also one half of a super successful opening combine, his partner in crime at the top of the batting order answering to the name of Rohit Sharma. The two right-handers in tandem are a sight for the Gods, both languid, both effortlessly sinuous, graceful beyond words. Gill prefers to pick the gaps, Rohit’s penchant is for picking out the spectators in the stands. Their understanding and chemistry has taken them places; they are the fastest Indian pair to accrue 1,000 runs in ODIs, in a mere 12 innings. They instinctively know when to take the bowling on and when to back off, when to go on the offensive and when to slide into the background, allowing the other person to take charge.

Cut out for big things from his Under-19 days — he was among the prime movers behind the successful World Cup campaign under Prithvi Shaw in New Zealand in 2018 — Gill is one of those rarities in Indian cricket that excels in backfoot play. The horizontal-bat strokes come naturally and with panache, be it standing tall and punching the ball square and in front of square on the off-side, or holding his position and using mainly his upper body to pull with felicity anywhere between wide mid-on and fine-leg. He may not appear as overtly wrist-y as a VVS Laxman, say, but his strong forearms ensure he doesn’t need a huge follow-through. That, combined with optimal timing, send apparently soft defensive punches hurtling across even slow outfields, the oohs and aahs emanating from the audience a justified reaction to watching poetry in motion.

“Gill is a classic example of how a ‘correct’ batsman can score quickly in 50-over cricket,” Ranatunga gushes during a chat with Money Control. “Like Virat (Kohli), he has shown that you don’t need to slog, you can be orthodox and conventional and still make a huge impact. Sometimes you look up at the score board and realise that Gill has scored faster than the sloggers. That’s how good he is.”

Like any top-class limited-overs batsman, the right-hander’s bread and butter is the ones and twos, the lifeblood of batting. Yes, he will dispatch good deliveries to the boundary with utter nonchalance, but he is equally proficient at working the gaps, at rotating the strike, at dropping the ball at his feet and running rapidly. A peachy boundary will trigger grudging admiration from the opposition, but repeated turning over of the strike will drive them ragged. The key to effective batsmanship is amalgamating these two facets, and Gill has struck that balance to a nicety, which makes it practically impossible for bowlers to line him up because he seldom faces more than three or four deliveries in a row against the same bowler.

His ascension to the No. 2 ranking is as organic as it was inevitable. At some stage in the future, he will undoubtedly take charge as India’s captain, but he is already a leader in his own right, the tempo-setter at the top of the batting tree alongside his captain. Gill’s controlled exuberance will from time to time allow Rohit to bat at his own pace, on days when he might not experience fluency from the get-go. As for Gill himself, his short- and long-term goals are hardly at odds with each other. Score runs, win matches, wow audiences, thrill connoisseurs, delight laymen. Those aren’t unwelcome goals, are they?