India Tour of England 2025: A Tightrope Walk is waiting for Shubman Gill

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Shubman Gill, 20, is the summary of India’s Test captain (Getty Images) The English series will indicate how the Test captain stands up in the face of a team that needs a serious building, Shubman Gill threw Gill into the deep end with nothing more than a rubber -like than a float tool? The clean-cut, square, calm-eyed, careful 25-year-old with 8% body fat received the highest honor in cricket, that of his country’s guidance in tests, and he begins his tenure with one of the most difficult, most viewed assignments in Indian cricket-a five-game test in England begins June 20. If the importance of the series is not enough, Gill will not lead a team in transition as in radical review. Also read: ‘You can’t fight’: Steve Waugh on the rise of T20s and the future of Test cricket This is the first Test series after retirement of three of India’s biggest names in Test cricket over the past decade – Virat Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin and Rohit Sharma. This leaves a team with a largely unproven batting order: The opening of duties falls on the young Yashasvi Jaiswal, all 19 Tests old, but in a tremendous form, and Abhimanyu Easwaran, who should not yet make his debut. The rest of the fighters include Gill himself, who is average on average in the middle thirties, and for just a year he struggles to justify his place in the group; a first time a call for Sai Sudharsan, not for first-class vouchers, but with a view to its white-ball breakthroughs; And a callback from the Wilderness for Karun Nair, which has been unknowingly ignored for almost a decade, despite becoming India’s second triplet century in only his third Test in 2016 (he would play three more tests that year before he was forgotten). This leaves Gill with only two overs with experience – Kl Rahul and Rishabh pant, who are still on his way to rediscovering his old form after a scary car accident in 2022 left him out of play for more than a year. The bowling division is doing a little better, but only because Gill in Jasprit Bumrah has the services of the best fast bowler in the game, and one of the best in the history of cricket. In addition to Bumrah, the bowling division has the same uncertainties as the batting – a bunch of Tyros in the form of Arshdeep Singh, Prasidh Krishna and Akash Deep, Mohammed Siraj, who is looking for the lost magic that made him so deadly from his debut in 2020 to 2023, and only one true spinner in Kuldep. The English series is then a wonderful prospect of seeing Gill’s personality as a leader stand up amid uncertainty and a team that needs a serious building, which offers the same excitement as a reality show that is surviving. Gill has long been seen as a potential leader in the power of the Indian cricket, although he was not a captain in his under-19 days, India only once on an easy command in Zimbabwe that won India-and led the IPL team Gujarat Titans for just two seasons with quiet competence, but not radical success. On the field, Gill carries himself with a modest air – he is mostly quiet, his celebrations are muted, and his body language is quiet to the point of being calm. If you did not look for him, you would not know that he was there. Will that change as he grows in his captaincy? The Indian cricket team, especially in tests, has always been strongly influenced by the personality of the captain. The tenure of Saurav Ganguly was the first major shift. India went from a team with a large individual batting talent, but an overly soft, easily rolled unit without a strong identity to a warring, daring, fractific team that used both cricket skills as well as mind games to try to win games. This indicated the rise of India as a serious nation with test game, one that could best beat on some days. Ganguly, with his Jekyll & Hyde Personality-like another, he, if imperial, with perfect ways on the one hand, ruthless, twilight and irregular on the other (remember his shirt celebrations on the balcony of the Hallowed Lords?)-was the face of this new identity that gave no interest to established hierarchical world. Also read: Women’s Premier League: Breaking Barriers one season at a time MS Dhoni’s tenure as captain a greater shift in Indian cricket culture. A game that was once dominated by the Rich and the Royal, and then by the definite urban urban, eventually spread across the length and width of the country, bringing players from small towns and towns to the big stage. Dhoni’s colorful, out-of-the-sciles, his complete lack of fear and extreme self-belief are more reflected in his white-ball captaincy (in this regard, by winning the first T20 World Championships, he has not only changed Indian cricket, but the course of international cricket) than his test leadership, where he tends to be more careful and defensive. But he did build on Ganguly’s legacy by taking India for the first time in its history to the top of the test world rankings. Look at the full image Virat Kohli has transformed the Indian Test team into a battle -hard unit loading in the war. (Getty Images) All this leads, with an air of inevitability, to the phenomenon known as Virat Kohli. Kohli took over in the same circumstances as the leader of the Indian test side as Gill does now. Kohli was just a few months older than Gill was average in the mid-thirties with the bat, struggled to establish himself in the team after a disastrous tour of England, and he had a team in transition after Dhoni announced that he was going as captain to the surprise of everyone. But from the moment Kohli led India for the first time to the test arena, there was no doubt – it was a captain with a capital C who was boldly. If Ganguly introduced fighting spirit and Dhoni added the mixture, Kohli transformed the team into a combat unit that loaded into the war. Everything is under Kohli Agree exit, thoughts, oral splashes, striking confrontations as you would expect in the weigh-in of boxing, cruel press conferences, sleds, fearless, dominant batting exhibitions, and most importantly, the totally unlikely rise of India as the world’s best fast nation. It is not surprising that Kohli is the most successful Test captain of India (40 wins in 68 games), with an unbeaten record in the Toet series at home (31 wins, two losses), the first victory ever on that final border, Australia, and with a long reign at the top of the test ranking. There is not much to say about Gill’s immediate predecessor Rohit Sharma, as he almost took over the team as an accident-he was the only senior player when Kohli retired-and a short time marked with heavy defeats, except that the team felt after the Kohli’s high-octane years that the team was a Laira-Laira, Is a ‘bhaiyya’ who has an lead is a penchant for everyone’s ‘bhaiyya’. (It is not to take anything away from his tactical nous, which was always seen in the IPL where he tasted unprecedented success with Mumbai Indians, as well as in ODIs and T20s). All of this is to say that Gill has a lot of history to live, and what he brings to the field in terms of his mindset can be transformative for Indian cricket. If there is one thing he has shown us, it is: In this age of T20, he is a player who has the necessary zeal for tests – the patience, the body language and the classic batting style, in the form of Rahul Dravid, which makes a good test batter – and the ability to explode in Frenetic action that brings success in the shortest format. And it’s an average straw to walk. Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel in Delhi. Also read: Why Rafael Nadal will remain the biggest star of French Open forever, catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More topics #cricket #international cricket #sports Read next story