For a man who moves so slowly, Shubman Gill can fit a lot into a split second. Gill is one of those rare athletes who works in a different rhythm to the rest of us, so that even when a ball’s coming down at 90mph he seems to be able to take a beat to whistle a bar of Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle while he thinks about what he’s going to order for dinner that evening, finally decides how to meet this latest delivery and then, at the last possible moment, follows through. He is, as any number of players and coaches say, someone you only need to see hit one shot to know exactly how good he is.
England, unfortunately for them, got to watch a lot more than one on the first day of the opening Test.
In style, Gill is a throwback batter. He plays the game with patrician disdain, waiting for the ball like it’s his butler, then, sending it scurrying away with a casual flick of his wrist, to fetch him a cold drink from somewhere the other side of the covers. It’s all done with the bare minimum of apparent effort, he pulls his bat up shy when he drives, and stops halfway through his pull shot. But in substance he is the very model of a modern middle order cricketer. He had scored more centuries in T20 cricket than he had in Test matches, and still has a higher top score in the shorter format. Just.
He was in many ways, still unfulfilled as a Test match batter when India decided to make him their new captain. He had scored five centuries, but they were all made in the subcontinent (four in India, one in Bangladesh) and his top-score elsewhere was a 91 he made in Brisbane four years ago. Coming into this Test, it was the only score of more than 50 he had made across tours of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies. His nickname, Prince, suits him for lots of reasons, not least that it felt like his defining achievements are all ahead of him. The hundred he made here was the first of them.
Gill is the youngest man to captain India since Sachin Tendulkar got the job in 1996. If he carries on in the way he played on the first day at Headingley, he will, unlike Tendulkar, have it for a long while yet. It helped that England made the hardest decision of the day for him. Judging a toss before the end of the match is like counting a chicken before it’s hatched, or damning a pitch before both teams have had a bat. Generally it pays to wait before you make your mind up. But after just half an hour, it was hard to avoid the creeping feeling that England had got it wrong here.
Gill said he would have done the same thing in Ben Stokes’s position. It turned out to be good for him that he didn’t get the opportunity. England may yet be vindicated, there have been a lot of good fourth-innings scores at Headingley in recent years, and the last six Tests here have all been won by the team bowling first, but the first day’s play was hot work for bowlers and the wickets were hard-earned. By midway through the morning session, Chris Woakes and Brydon Carse had both had a go from either end, Josh Tongue tried both sides of the wicket. It already felt as if Stokes had turned out his pockets searching for England’s first wicket.
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It was one of those mornings when the bowling team first measures success in edges and almosts, clapping the balls that whizz past slips, or fizz over the gully, then, when the batters are starting to middle it, celebrating the shots you insist you want the batter to be playing, like the drives that might have been sliced behind if they hadn’t disappeared through cover for four. England eventually got one, then two, wickets, in the run-up to lunch. So it fell to Gill, batting at No 4, to reassert control of the innings. He was waiting for England when they came back on to the field, having spent most of the break patting back throwdowns from a couple of the squad players.
He carried on that way through the rest of the day, Carse, who goes about his bowling like the batter is a stray nail that needs to be hammered back into the crease, troubled him some. But the rest of England’s attack hardly mustered a chance worth appealing for between them. So Gill moved imperiously to his hundred, as unruffled, and regal, as Cleopatra along the Nile, the only blemishes in his innings were the one bungled single on 97, and the pair of black socks peeping out from beneath the hems of his white trousers.
