Shubman Gill's four years in Test cricket have divided opinion. His latest spell of rocky form could be down to minor tweaks in his technique – but should his unique style be tampered with?
Gill's first six scores in Test cricket read 45, 35*, 50, 31, 7 and 91 – across three Tests in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the last of which helped India to one of their greatest-ever Test victories.
There were five scores of 30 or above in his first six innings. But in his next 18 outside Asia since then, Gill has crossed that mark just twice, 36 against South Africa last January and 31 against Australia in Adelaide last December.
Contrast that to his record in Asia. Gill averages nearly 42, with five centuries and five half-centuries to his name. In 2024, he averaged 50.66 across nine home Tests – the rest of India's top seven batters in those matches averaged 36.38. He was nearly 40% better, as a top three batter in a bowler-friendly era and conditions.
On the face of it, this is a normal record for a subcontinental batter to have, given the pitches and conditions they were brought up on, and the development of their technique – but Gill is not quite that kind of a batter.
Shubman Gill is not the average subcontinental batter
On his debut tour of Australia, he stood out for his ability to play the short ball. Gill just seemed to have so much time, and his bat scythed through the air both venomously and gracefully as he dealt disdainfully with deliveries at chest and shoulder height.
Soon after that series, Gill's father, Lakhwinder Singh, opened up on how he had trained his son: "Since he was nine, I made him play 1500 short balls every day. To make him adept at handling fast bowling, I used to throw the ball over a manji (charpoy). The ball tends to travel faster after skidding off the charpoy. Besides that, he practiced with a single stump as his bat. That helped Shubman in finding the middle of the bat more often than not."
His setup at the crease on that tour was also back foot dominant. Gill employed a back-and-across trigger movement with his back foot, before the front foot followed to sit parallel. He also bent at the knees in a crouched position.
When he wanted to play off the back foot, Gill would rise with the ball.
When he wanted to play off the front foot, he would take a big stride forward.
Through the practice of playing short balls over and over from a young age, Gill has also developed a unique bat swing. He has a high backlift, and as the bat comes down it can often do so at an angle, something which is more natural for a batter when their weight remains back, like Gill in the above clips. Not as horizontal as a pull or cut shot for example, but also not as straight as, say, a Kohli cover drive.
The good, the bad, the ugly of Gill's technique
Such a setup is probably what allowed Gill to be so successful in Australia early on. Horizontal bat shots were more "on", thanks to the bouncier nature of the tracks. Since he's also supremely talented and has an eye for gauging length quickly, Gill has shown himself to be able to access almost the entire off side with an angled bat – even areas like cover and extra cover off fuller deliveries, which are more conventionally (almost exclusively) accessed with straight-bat shots.
The trade-off of the setup is this: the high and wide backlift, along with the angled bat make him effective off the back foot, but he naturally needs room to execute those shots. He is therefore forced to play slightly away from the body even with more straight-bat shots – creating a gap between the bat and his front pad. It means that against deliveries on a fourth-stump line, Gill can be cramped for room, and against fuller, incoming deliveries, can be bowled through the gate or trapped lbw.
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By the time of his Gabba knock, he had not been in the Indian setup for very long, and what we saw at that point was probably the closest to his naturally developed technique.
It was suited to tracks with extra bounce, but the fact remains that if Gill is going to play Test cricket consistently, the majority of his matches will be in Asia – within that, mostly in India.
Wickets in the subcontinent do not offer the same amount of bounce as those in Australia or South Africa, or perhaps even England for that matter. It means his method has less upside, and crucially, becomes less worth the trade-off that comes with it.
Whether this was suggested by Gill himself, or a member of India's coaching staff, he seems to have added a front-foot press – a half-step that enables a slight transfer of weight onto the front foot – to his initial movement at the crease, even against deliveries on a slightly shorter length. This was first evident on occasion during the 2023 Border-Gavaskar Trophy in India.
The usual back-and-across step has been retained, and the logic of a front press is sound. It's advisable on Indian wickets where there is less bounce and pacers are forced to pitch the ball fuller. The weight going forward also forces the bat to come down slightly straighter on fuller deliveries – reducing the possibility of a bat-pad gap being created.
The front-foot press is a significant feature of Virat Kohli's game – it's what makes him an excellent player of the cover drive. He's rarely done in by incoming deliveries. Rather, it's the ones going away that can catch the outside edge of a straighter bat.
That is a mode of dismissal that's just started to creep in to Gill's game, although it's still only a very small sample.
In 2021, his first year of Test cricket in Asia, he was dismissed seven times in 11 innings by pace bowlers – five times bowled or lbw and one more time by chipping an inswinging delivery from Jofra Archer to mid-on. In 2024, he was out four times to seamers – two caught behind off the outside edge, one bowled (by which point he'd made 110), and a strangle down the leg side. (In 2022 and 2023, he was only dismissed by spinners on the subcontinent.)
Incorporating a front-foot press into Gill's game could also be giving him the added advantage of getting his feet moving more down the wicket when playing spin. Attempting to play the slower bowlers off the back foot, especially in the subcontinent, is fraught with danger.
All this sounds good, what's the catch?
Well, this could be contributing to Gill's struggles outside Asia.
After a strong start, the scores have tapered off. It could be because a weight shift onto the front foot is not entirely advisable on bouncier pitches – even less so when there is seam movement on offer.
There's no foolproof technique against movement off the wicket, but a slightly more angled bat could have the advantage of more coverage – that is, if the ball moves laterally it could simply hit higher or lower on the face, rather than take an edge.
Gill was employing the press on the recently-concluded tour of Australia, but not consistently. In fact, in a single over in Sydney, just three balls apart, he played two deliveries on an almost-identical line and length in different fashion.
When he remained on the back foot, Gill was able to stand tall and ride the bounce even as the bat came down at an angle. In the second instance, when he took the half-step and shifted his weight forwards, the bat naturally came down straighter, and he was a touch late on the ball.
Gill's stride is generally longer when he attempts to play fuller deliveries off the front foor (see the Gabba '21 example from earlier) – it's unlikely that the press here was simply an error in judging the length. Rather, it looks like a conscious change to his technique which hasn't become second nature just yet – and therefore he has the occasional defaulting to not setting up that way.
Technical shifts are not easy – patience is needed with Gill
The first question to ask is whether it is the right course of action to get a batter like Gill committing on the front foot more often. On an individual level, it should help him produce better returns in the majority of conditions he will bat in. But is that worth potentially hampering his "natural game" (a buzzword these days) in conditions where most of India's other batters might struggle?
The simplest solution would be for Gill to adopt two different techniques – employ the press in conditions where there is less bounce on offer, and remove it on other tracks.
But this is far, far, easier said than done. Batting is said to be a skill of repeatability, and it is extremely rare for players to be able to employ these kinds of adjustments fluidly, on a consistent basis. Gill might eventually be able to do it, but that can take years.
Even if he were to simply add the press to his game, that would require him to unlearn the trigger movement and setup he had been using for years, and relearn the movements and timings of the new technique.
The most vocal criticism of Gill of late from certain quarters is that he has been given an unnecessarily long rope, and that someone who averages 35.1 after 30-odd Tests is not good enough to play for India.
But if he is tweaking his technique, as long as he is in the process, patience will be needed. He needs to work out how to blend the best of both worlds – and that is going to lead to underwhelming returns for a while. It's also worth mentioning that Gill missed the first Test of this Australia tour with a thumb injury, an additional mitigating factor for his scores in this series at least. If that hasn't healed fully, it could play on his mind and/or take energy away from implementing a technical shift.
In fact, despite all this, he is not significantly worse than his teammates with the bat. In Tests he has played, India's other top seven batters average 34.9. The other top four batters average 35.8. Cause for concern at the moment is minimal.
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