Gill Is Here To Stay

SPORT IS DEFINED by an obsession for excellence. To push the bar each time you take the field. And each time you fail, you go back to the drawing board and come back better and stronger. That’s what the quest for perfection is all about. No day is ever perfect and the quest is always to be perfect in an imperfect day.

Shubman Gill is the best example of this. He hadn’t scored for two consecutive games and in his own mind, things weren’t going to plan. He needed to get back to the drawing board and iron out a few things. On the eve of the Pakistan match on September 21, India had opted for a rest day having returned at 2AM the night before from Abu Dhabi. It was a fair call with temperatures hovering around 42 degrees in Dubai. And yet, at 2PM or so local time, we get a message in the media group that the Indians will have optional training from 6PM at the ICC academy.

Three players turned up for the practice. Shubman Gill, Abhishek Sharma and Varun Chakravarthy. And it was Shubman and Abhishek who literally floored Pakistan on September 14. As I reached the academy, I saw Shubman trying to perfect the cut and the pull. Thereafter, he unleashed his entire array of strokes and played some audacious shots. By the end of the training session, he was match-ready. The confidence was back and mentally, he must have felt better. It was all on show when he played a sublime knock that allowed India to win their seventh consecutive T20 match against the archrivals.

With Shubman, I have seen this obsessive quest for excellence in the last three months. He comes to training on time and goes about his routine with a kind of stoic monotony. He does his fielding drills and bats for long periods. And once that batting stint is done, you will see him do special catching drills with fielding coach T Dileep and, finally, run short sprints to conclude the session. It is this training that has made Shubman Gill India’s next big cricket star.

The truth is excellence isn’t achieved on match days. Rather, excellence is all about doing the mundane and the boring day in and out— with no one watching, turning up for practice at 40 degrees heat and, yet, not flinching an inch. The effort away from the media glare is what shapes a sportsperson and Shubman Gill has been doing that to perfection.

He is also every bit the leader in the change room. Against Pakistan, when things weren’t going well, Shubman and Hardik were seen multiple times walking up to Suryakumar Yadav and discussing plans. You don’t need to be the captain to be a leader and that was evident time and again with the Indians. And when it was India’s turn to bat, Gill was ready a lot in advance of the umpires and was seen sitting in the dugout with a bat and ball in hand trying to visualise. It was his way of getting into the moment and be ready for action. We know Tendulkar used to do this and had his headphones on before going out to bat. Also, he would not want to be disturbed by anyone at the time. It is the very same for Gill. He gets into a zone—the hallmark of an elite high-performance athlete.

Make no mistake, Gill is here to stay. Having seen him very close in the last few months, I can say with certainty that he has a very stable head on his shoulders and knows what his job is. As India’s red-ball captain and T20 vice captain, Gill knows there will be intense media scrutiny. And yet, he is unfazed. For him, the quest for excellence is far more significant than anything else. With time, Gill will get even better and I would not be surprised if he elevates himself as a leader in the next few years.

DubaiIndian cricketIndian cricket captainPakistanShubman Gill