Gill pads up for captaincy innings Premium

Shubman Gill named India's 37th Test captain, facing challenges in leading young team on England tour.

A little after 1.30 pm on Saturday, Ajit Agarkar formalised what everyone invested in Indian cricket knew was a foregone conclusion. The chairman of selectors officially announced Shubman Gill’s coronation as India’s 37th Test captain, making the 25-year-old the fifth youngest to occupy the hottest sporting seat in the country.

Gill is already a semi-veteran, if you like, with 108 international appearances since his debut in a One-Day International in Hamilton in January 2019. Ahead of Season 17 of the Indian Premier League, he didn’t have a great deal of captaincy experience but in the last 14 months, he has evolved as an excellent leader of men at Gujarat Titans, where he has handled superstars and emerging heroes from India and overseas with aplomb and empathy.

One of the more important but less acknowledged traits in a good leader is the ability to walk in their colleagues’ shoes. That’s something Gill is certain to have picked up from Rohit Sharma, his predecessor who walked away into the Test sunset earlier this month after three years in charge. The sign of a good student is the willingness and the ability to learn from others while sticking to their own natural grain. In his six years at the highest level, Gill has shown himself to be a quick learner, though he must now learn on the job, and even more quickly, as he embarks on an exciting but unquestionably arduous new chapter.

The Punjab batter’s immediate challenge is a five-Test tour of England starting in less than a month’s time. In more than 90 years, India have won only three series in that country – famously in 1971 under Ajit Wadekar when they completed the West Indies-England double in less than six months, under Kapil Dev in 1986 and then in 2007 when Rahul Dravid emulated Wadekar by backing up a 1-0 triumph in the Caribbean a year previously with a similar result in England.

As if that statistic isn’t daunting enough, Gill must make do without three formidable pillars of Indian cricket, who all retired from the five-day game within five months of each other. Off-spinner supreme R. Ashwin pulled the plug on his international career in Brisbane in December, while Rohit’s retirement was followed five days later by Virat Kohli’s, a development of seismic magnitude whose import will become obvious in the next several weeks.

Even with these stalwarts, India couldn’t put it past England in the latter’s backyard. It will therefore be unrealistic to expect Gill to wave a magic wand and get the job done, especially in his maiden foray as the Test captain. In that regard, there is a little less pressure on Gill than there has been on any Indian captain for a long time now. The 25-year-old is an investment for the long term and the principal decision-makers will be indulgent enough for him to make mistakes and learn from them, but they are within their rights to hope for him to repay the faith they have placed in his leadership abilities.

In various quarters, K.L. Rahul was viewed as a possible Rohit successor. There is no little merit in that line of thought; the 33-year-old from Bengaluru has captained the country in all three formats and has plenty of cricket left in him, apart from being the senior-most specialist batter in the Test squad. For some reason, the theory that Rahul would be a ‘stop-gap’ skipper gathered pace. Gill was the beneficiary of that perception because, at eight years younger, he is seen as a more viable longer term option.