Prince Charging

IT’S A RATHER REMARKABLE THING THAT FOR a man who has faced immense pressure to score big runs ever since he can remember and has even been saddled with the ex­traordinary burden of being Indian cricket’s next-big-thing since his early teens, Shubman Gill is somehow equipped with a per­ma-smile. It doesn’t matter if he has blundered on the field, or has missed the start of his first World Cup campaign due to a bout of dengue fever, or if he’s being teased by an entire stand of the Wankhede for his alleged relationships (chants that made his teammates frown with embarrass­ment), Gill always finds a way to smile—the edges of which are bracketed by dimples that fast widen to light up his classically handsome face.

That beatific smile held him in good stead right through 2025, a year of great tumult in Indian cricket, but wholly watershed for and in Gill’s professional life. That smile was there when he was given perhaps the most scrutinised job in all of sport, captain of India’s Test side, ahead of the tour of England, where India haven’t won a long-form series since August 2007, or since Gill was seven years old. It was also there when he struck a hundred at Leeds, in his very first Test match as captain, folding into a trademark bow like an established conductor of a philharmonic. Significantly, it was very much there when he lost the Headingley Test, a match that ought to have been won no less, as he faced up to a round of tough questioning first at the presentation ceremony and then by the media in the press conference.

But in perhaps the finest hour and second of his young life, that smile, with great symbolism, vanished altogether. It was a moment steeped in rich history as Gill first circled under Brydon Carse’s mishit off Akash Deep’s delivery somewhere around the cover region of the Edgbaston field, before pouching the catch that gave India its first victory on not just this tour, but for the first time in Birmingham in nine attempts. Before his ecstatic mates could swaddle him in celebration, Gill closed his eyes, cocked his fists and exchanged the constant smile for a guttural roar. And just like that, by repeatedly punch­ing holes in the thick Midlands air around him, it was all released in a few terrific, breathless pumps: the months of uncertainty since the slew of losses in red-ball cricket, home and away, that cost India not only a near-secure spot in the World Test Championship final but also three certified legends in Virat Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin and Rohit Sharma; the weeks of nervousness in the build-up to the England tour; the days of anguish after the soul-crushing loss in the first Test and the many restless hours in Birmingham as Gill and India mounted a comeback for the ages.

Also, just like that, Gill—as captain and batsman—had resuscitated India’s Test set-up, first with some insanely hard calls behind the scenes with the composition of the playing eleven and then with his blade, scoring 430 runs over two innings of the same game, the most by any player bar one (Graham Gooch, 456 runs) in the long history of Test cricket, yanking an ecosys­tem, almost singlehandedly, into a bright new era. Thus, the man fondly known as Prince indeed proved he is the rightful heir, ready for his reign as king.

FOR ALL PRACTICAL purposes, the life and times of Gill—a boy born to a farmer in Fazilka, Punjab, who happened to be a cricket-tragic— begins with his Test debut in late 2020. Although he had featured in three ODIs by then, shortly after playing a key role in India’s Under-19 World Cup victory in 2018 (he was the team’s highest run-getter, with a hundred to boot in the semifinals against Pakistan), Gill found himself thrown in the deep end of a ridiculously difficult series in and against Australia. With the entire side having been bowled out for 36 runs in the first Test in Adelaide, after which Kohli flew home for the birth of his first child, Gill replaced his U19 World Cup-winning skipper, Prithvi Shaw, as opener. With seemingly perfect technique to tackle the new ball, the lanky lad scored a dogged 45 runs in the first innings at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and remained unbeaten on 35 in the second as makeshift captain Ajinkya Rahane hit the winning runs to level the series. Three weeks later, with a glorious 91 in the second innings in Bris­bane, a second-string Indian side had won a Test series for the ages.

That innings of 91 remained his high­est score in Test cricket for nearly two years, until he found the three-figure mark for the first time against Bangladesh in Chattogram in December 2022, only to make a habit of it in white-ball cricket in 2023, a World Cup year. In the space of just nine days in January 2023, Gill had hit three ODI hundreds, including a double hundred, to all but become the first name on then-coach Rahul Dravid’s squad for the 50-over World Cup. His appetite for 50- over hundreds simply couldn’t be satiated that year, with five of them leading up to the quadrennial, until just hours before the campaign began, he was laid low with dengue. Although he did recover in record time, missing only the first two matches and returning to the pitch for the big one against Pakistan in Ahmedabad, the virus had eaten into his muscle mass and he struggled to recreate the form that had made him a shoo-in for a home World Cup in the first place.

But 2023 was a significant year for Gill in Test cricket too, as this was when his team-first attitude surfaced—a great qual­ity for a future leader. On the tour of the West Indies in July, the then-opener asked to be dropped down to No 3, a position recently vacated by the axing of CheteshwarPujara, mainlytomakeplaceat thetopforayoungphenomcalledYashasvi Jaiswal. Instantly, Jaiswal bashed 171 runs on debut and never looked back, even as Gilltooklongertosettleinatone-drop, with only three hundreds over a span of 17 Tests, scored at a less-than-stellar average of 37.

Something major seemed amiss to elevate his run-making in the non-open­ing role to justify his talent. Few could’ve known it then, but that ingredient was captaincy.

In Indian cricket’s recent history, stretching back to the turn of the centu­ry, some greats have been crushed by the saddle of leadership while a handful have risen to the task. Gill, meanwhile, has flourished like few others have.

Dinesh Karthik, the former India wicketkeeper-turned-pundit, revealed an insight given to him by Kohli when he coached the legend to the only major silver­ware missing from his trophy cabinet— the Indian Premier League (IPL), achieved earlier this year. Speaking to Sky Sports, where he is a commentator, Karthik said that Kohli believed that the greatest thing to have happened to him as a batsman and cricketer overall was being thrust into captaincy. It spurred him on to the extent that in his very first Test as leader, back in Adelaide in 2014, Kohli struck hundreds in both innings. Level adjusted, there was simply no looking back from thereon.

Gill’s first tryst with stewardship came with the Gujarat Titans (GT) in IPL last year. With Hardik Pandya returning to the Mumbai Indians, Gill was made leader, and he thrived, scoring over 400 runs for a third straight season. Then, in 2025, he came into his own as a captain, what with GT often finding themselves at the very top of a high­ly competitive table and qualifying easily for the playoffs. England’s Jos Buttler, who played under Gill in the season gone by for GT, had this to say on a podcast about his leadership style: “He’s pretty calm and measured when he speaks… I feel like on the field, he’s got a bit of fight about him; a bit of intensity, quite passionate. I think he’ll be a mix of Kohli and Rohit.”

Because that IPL was also the stage for the sudden and twin retirements of Kohli and Rohit from Test cricket, the national selectors had a rather tiny shortlist to anoint the next leader—25-year-old Gill or 31-year-old Jasprit Bumrah, the finest fast bowler in the world and also someone who had led India in Rohit’s absence on the recent tour of Australia.

For reasons beyond cricketing acu­men, they chose Gill, and he promptly slotted himself into the most coveted and crucial position in the batting order, No 4, a vacancy still warm with the achievements of Kohli. So there Gill was at Headingley, alongside coach Gautam Gambhir and a young side, given the unenviable task of helping Indian cricket move on from three legends and two back-to-back series losses, to New Zealand at home and Australia in their backyard. Donning the Indian skip­per’s navy-blue blazer for the first time at Leeds, he lost the toss and was stuck in to bat by England’s Ben Stokes. India piled on 471 runs in the first innings anyway.

BUT A BALL before Gill fell, for 147 runs on his captaincy debut, India were 430 for three, which meant that the side ended up losing seven wick­ets for just 41 runs to fully let go of their ad­vantage. This occurrence, unfortunately, wasn’t a one-off in Leeds as in the second innings, armed with the firepower to set an unreachable target and wholly remove the chances of an England win from the equation, India lost their last six wickets for just 31 runs, this after wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant had struck his second cen­tury in the Test.

Still, a target of 371 runs was a steep one; steep enough for England to have chased a higher target just once before in their history—against Rohit’s India on the previous tour in 2022, where they lost only three wickets in their hunt for 378 in Birmingham. Last week at Leeds, thanks to some inconsistent bowling and sever­al dropped catches over the course of the game by the Indians, England won the match in the final hour of the final day with five wickets to spare. So, for the first time in the history of Test cricket, a team that had notched five individual centuries, India in this case, had lost a match. And for Gill and his side, it all felt rather bleak; worse, it even seemed the same old, same old.

Until, of course, a team bus packed with the dejected travelled south to a cricket field located in the university area of Birmingham—Edgbaston.

One of the primary reasons why Gill was chosen as India cricket’s Test cap­tain over Bumrah was due to the work­load management of an injury-prone fast bowler. Even before the five-match series in England had begun, Bumrah announced that he would make him­self available only for three of them. So, the overwhelming fear in the camp, and among Indian cricket’s vast legion of fans, was that Bumrah would perhaps not lend his services for the Birmingham Test, given that the third match was at Lord’s, the home of cricket, a game no fit player would like to miss.

At the toss in Edgbaston, which Gill once again lost and was asked to bat, the captain confirmed Bumrah’s absence, replaced by pacer Akash Deep. Dropped after just one Test were Sai Sudharsan and Shardul Thakur, making way for batting all-rounder Nitish Kumar Reddy and off-spinner Washington Sundar, respec­tively. Their presence was to add batting depth, Gill explained at the toss, but few were buying it. Because Kuldeep Yadav, India’s attacking bowling option, wasn’t picked either, both fans and former play­ers alike wondered how a second-string bowling line-up would take 20 wickets, most essential to win a game of Test crick­et. All the runs in the world could at best secure a draw, for only wickets eventually win Test matches.

BUT FIRST, INDIA had to score some runs, big runs, given that the hosts had rolled out one of the flattest pitches in England’s recorded his­tory. Gill walked in at the fall of the second wicket, that of Karun Nair’s, with India in a spot of early bother at 95 for two. He was watchful for his first 33 balls, only to edge the 34th he faced from Chris Woakes just beyond the reach of second slip to find his first boundary. Then, a second edged stroke in the same over, again past the slip cordon, brought him his second boundary. There­after, however, he simply turned flawless. For the next eight hours and a bit that he oc­cupied the crease over two days, Gill drove crisply through the off side and short-arm jabbed his pulls into the vacant patches on the leg side. It was a treat to witness as the batting milestones tumbled. Then, so did the world records.

When he was finally dismissed late on Day Two, Gill had fallen short of a deserving triple century by just 31 runs. But his essay of 269 runs was the high­est score by an Indian captain, home or away, and the highest score by any Indian in England. With 587 team runs on the board, it was now time to see what the bowlers that the captain had handpicked had in store. Plenty, ostensibly. Despite the flatness of the pitch and the added worry of the Dukes cricket ball going soft well before it ought to, India’s new-ball bowlers, Akash Deep and Mohammed Siraj, dismissed six English batters on scores of zero between them. If not for a sterling 303-run stand between Harry Brook and wicketkeeper Jamie Smith for the sixth wicket, England would have had far fewer than 407, for their last five wickets collapsed for just 20 runs.

Now India had a commanding first innings lead of 180 runs, and it was time to drive home the advantage. Once again, the onus was taken up by Gill, who played clas­sical strokes for his first hundred runs, before going ballistic with slog sweeps on reaching the three-figure mark. When he fell on 161, Gill became the only player in the 148-year history of Test cricket to score a 200 and a 150 in the same Test match. His tally of 430 runs in a single Test was second only to Gooch, who made India and captain Mohammad Azharuddin pay with scores of 333 and 123 at Lord’s in 1990.

The target Gill had set England, 608 runs, was well beyond the hosts, even in this bang-a-minute Bazball era, but the fear yet again was whether India’s bowlers could bowl out the opposition for a second time, especially after a spell of rain on the morning of the final day reduced the overs to be bowled.

Fear not, said Gill and his strike bowl­ers, Akash and Siraj, conjurers of all 10 English wickets between them in the first innings, chimed in in unison. If the Gill of the first Test was seen making de­cisions in a congregation, he had already become confident enough to make them largely by himself in the second. Before Siraj’s first over, the stump mic recorded Gill asking the bowler to pitch the ball up on this wicket. Four balls later, a full de­livery had dismissed opener Zak Crawley. When the last wicket fell on Day Five, Gill looked even more proud than when he smacked the twin hundreds, for this was a reflection of his leadership skills.

First, there was a roar, then that hand­some smile returned, soon garlanded with a medal around his neck for his genius. The smile was unmoved for the rest of the proceedings, during the presentation cere­mony and then the media briefing, taking various roles on the spectrum of glee, from happy to smug, often bordering on I-told-you-so, but largely just thrilled with how the era of Gill had come to be.