Shubman Gill is dominating ODI cricket like few batters ever have. Yet this pure technician with precocious talent is still finding his way at the top level of Test cricket. Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief Phil Walker wonders if this next generation of batters can really have it all any more.
Every era has its signature shots. The Lost Generation had Hammond’s balletic, brutish offside bunt. The Sixties had the twin pillars of Sobers’ wrist-snapper through the covers and Geoff’s block. Gen-X had Viv’s flick-from-anywhere and Miandad’s reverse-sweep, while for Millennials, excepting the handful of poets aching for Lara’s swash off the hip, nothing said 594-6dec quite like Ricky Ponting pirouetting on his front foot and slap-pulling length balls through midwicket.
Even now, amid the dross and debris of the daily overload, certain shots stand alone, shimmering in perfect isolation: Pietersen’s reverse slog into the car park; AB’s scoop over the shoulder; Rohit’s pick-up; Livingstone’s toe-ender to deep square leg.
The greatest shot in the game today belongs to Shubman Gill. You know the one, it’s everywhere. It’s about to be offered a six-part series on Star. Here is a signature that honours the great ones of the past, contained beneath its surface-level cockiness (Richards) and effrontery (Ponting) the perfect alchemy of poise, touch, balance and electrifying reaction speed that binds them all (Boycs not so much). The shot, naturally enough, carries certain master-commander echoes of Rohit’s own special contribution, but look again, and Gill’s mainlining another useful model.
We speak, of course, of Shubman’s pull. But it’s also Shubman’s flick, and his pick-up, and at times not far off Shubman’s drive, and it’s played off the front foot (though it springs from the back), and can be utilised (its genius being as much conceptual as practical) at any stage of any game, to basically any delivery from which a pace bowler has dumbly directed above bail-height.
So: he plants his front foot straight down the pitch in line with the ball. The idea is to use that front leg as ballast, around which the upper body can do its work. With the base set and head in line to the ball, the right shoulder can then be released, twisting the torso 90 degrees through impact, the power concentrated in the body’s upper half. While all this is going on, his head – and this really is the thing – remains perfectly still, forehead pointing to the floor, the peak of his lid shielding his gaze from the bowler, who is now of little relevance, his function already long served. He doesn’t have to hit hard – he never hits hard – and because this all happens that tiny bit faster than with normal players, so the ball travels that tiny bit straighter, into unpopulated areas, where fielders aren’t.
AB is the model, and his low backlift the inspiration. When Gill was starting out, the trend was for high backlifts, all the better to hit long and far, to access the sightscreen down the ground. But AB’s signature genius was to make a play for the sightscreen the other way. Gill, as a kid, observed de Villiers’ low hands and shortish backlift, saw how they opened up the angles to access every corner of the ground, and worked at refining his own into something similar. Gill’s backlift today is short, compact, the wrists cocked, and the ball striking precise and economical. The result is the creation of a kind of phenomenon.
In 50-over cricket, that oddly durable hybrid form of strength and touch, power and strategy, Gill has found his perfect platform, revelling in the space it allows, and the time it affords him, just to bat, and so bat he does, in calming waves of serene, unending purposefulness. His numbers in the format, averaging 60, striking at 100 – no one’s gone like that before. He’s the youngest man to make an ODI double-century. He’s presenting a decent case for the extended future of the whole format, all while posing as the frontman of the New Orthodoxy.
Gill is known to be infatuated with technique, which is obvious – it’s not possible to bat like this any other way. But infatuations can clutter up the mind. At 25, he is stood, bat slung over his shoulder, at the crossroads of his Test career. A record of five hundreds at 35 from 32 matches is not bad, but those runs are heavily weighted to home Tests, while his most recent experiences in Australia – three matches, a best of 31 – led Ponting to suggest that he curb the tinkering and get back to the core basics.
“Rather than making wholesale changes, he needs to trust his instincts more,” observed Ponting, after Gill’s game at Sydney left him with a record of two fifties from 13 Tests outside Asia. “When he’s in form, he looks as good as anyone in world cricket. But the numbers don’t really stack up, do they, away from home?”
If anyone is good enough to mine the modern game’s most elusive truth, then it’s Shubman Gill. He is one of a small handful of next-gen batters with the gifts, youth and (crucially) opportunity to build something epic, to take the gongs and dollars and yet still invest in those Test Manhattans, to show that it is still possible in this bloated, cluttered, dizzying age of perpetual content, to have the lot.
So, Gill is one. But who else? Harry Brook perhaps, though his white-ball numbers are messy to say the least. (He’s overdue a big IPL next month.) Rachin Ravindra may have the game, but will he get the cross-format chances? Anyone else? Cameron Green? Tristan Stubbs? Help me out here.
White-ball savage Travis Head, pushing up to 4,000 Test runs, may be the modern model, but the 31-year-old’s story is, in the strictest sense, exceptional; a little over three years ago, as he cheerfully reminded me last September amid another bout of hilarious ODI behaviour, he’d played 20-odd Test matches and been dropped four times. Head is not just the game’s great outlier. He’s one of its greatest survivors.
It’s becoming harder to have it all. Back to the epicentre: India’s other precocious phenom, the Test machine Yashasvi Jaiswal, remains on the periphery of their white-ball teams. Rishabh Pant is evidently a red-ball specialist. And none of their current T20I top-three can make their 50-over side. This is India, where the depth is immense, and so perhaps this is inevitable, that as the cash rolls in and playing forces expand, and thus to fragment, so specialists hunker down to protect their territory.
In January, Steve Smith passed 10,000 runs in Test cricket, a feat that felt seismic and poignant all at once, for there may not be many more behind him. One hopes that Virat Kohli might get there, maybe this year, the old ham swagging out of a good IPL to smash it up in England this summer, screaming to the gods of south London in early August sometime.
It would be quite the thing. The 10,000th, brought up with a hard-run two, to join the ranks of the true untouchables. You’d love to see it. We all would. But you know what will happen next. Even before he’s rescratched his guard, you’ll find your mind drifting further ahead again, beyond the passing theatre of Virat’s fifth act, to a dreamlike place where he is not, in fact, the last, but simply the latest.
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