IND vs ENG: The transition is over! Shubman Gill and Gautam Gambhir deliver a powerful statement at The Oval | Cricket News
London: Once all the media formalities were completed, the Indian team whizzed out of the Oval fast on Monday afternoon. They reached the team hotel and had a short customary celebration before dispersing. If one went out for a stroll in the evening on the stretch from Oxford Street to Piccadilly Circus, one could have casually bumped into a few members of the Indian team.Prasidh Krishna was there with his family. Kuldeep Yadav hopped stores with former India leg-spinner Piyush Chawla. Arshdeep Singh too had his family with him. Head coach Gautam Gambhir checked out of the team hotel by evening. Captain Shubman Gill had his friends and family over to celebrate a memorable tour that has placed him at the centre of Indian cricket’s power centre. The coach-captain duo has come out of their first assignment with flying colours, having drawn the five-Test series, including the dramatic six-run win in the fifth Test on Monday.Bigger milestones now beckon. Before this tour, there had been discussions around the future of the coach-captain combination. Having settled all the doubts, now it’s time for the two to set concrete plans for the future.
Poll
Do you believe Shubman Gill is the right captain for the Indian cricket team moving forward?
Gill landed in England with an Indian team in the first week of June with questions being raised about his inexperience. Now he deserves to go off the constant high-performance routine of an India cricketer for a few days.Meanwhile, Gambhir’s tenure as India’s head coach has revolved around his strong people-over-individuals philosophy. He is also a coach who came into the Indian dressing room to wipe out the superstar culture.
Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin retired from Test cricket before the selectors could get down to planning for the English summer. Jasprit Bumrah, the biggest name after Kohli and Rohit, declared he was available for only three of the five Tests.India boarded the flight from Mumbai to London after a disastrous first six months in Test cricket under Gambhir. The ICC Champions Trophy triumph in March aside, Gambhir knew he had to deliver. Not that there was any immediate threat to his position, but a drubbing with a fresh team here would have been detrimental to his reputation. The first thing he did was to instill enough conviction in Gill and the team.“Before the start of the series, Gauti bhai (Gambhir) said that we are a young team, but we don’t want to be looked at as a young team. We want to be looked at as a gun team’. The way we played today showed why we are a gun team,” Gill said. This has also been Gambhir’s line of thinking. After India pulled off a draw in the fourth Test in Manchester, having trailed almost throughout the match, a typically combative Gambhir decided to front up to the media. “I don’t like to call this a team in transition. I will say they are inexperienced,” he had said.There is this unmistakable aversion to the word ‘transition’. “Even if there was no transition or if we had the old players, everything would have looked good if batters and bowlers performed,” Gill said. Then he went on to highlight his batting lineup’s stellar performance in the series.“Almost every batter in the series has performed. They have scored hundreds. They have scored runs in crucial and crunch situations,” he mentioned, offering enough hints that this team management had moved on long before the world could.Gill’s confidence in his batting lineup is backed up by numbers. Gill himself scored 754 runs while KL Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja finished with more than 500 runs. Rishabh Pant scored 479 runs in the seven innings he batted before suffering a broken foot. Yashasvi Jaiswal finished with 412 runs.On the topic of transition or inexperience, Gill has been bullish about the potential of his team. He believed the scoreline before the fifth Test wasn’t a true reflection of the cricket India have played. He maintained that even after the win on Monday. For him, even if India had lost the last Test, the scoreline wouldn’t have been a fair one.The plans will be taking shape soon. There is a certain assertion in Gill’s speech now which suggests he is a man who is firmly in charge. He is already looking ahead.Handling BumrahThat India managed to win two Tests on the tour without Bumrah playing must have settled a lot of nerves. TOI understands that Bumrah will either play an entire Test series or sit out of it in future. So, it could come down to picking either the two-Test series against West Indies at home in Oct before South Africa come in Dec for another two Tests. India don’t have another five-Test series in two years. With the team expected to play on spin-friendly pitches in India, there won’t be much load on the pacers. The selectors and Bumrah can comfortably plan his availability for white-ball tournaments like the T20 World Cup at home in Feb-March next year.ODI leadership shakeupWith Gill and Gambhir striking a cord, there could be a temptation to revisit the ODI leadership group going forward. Gill is already the designated vice-captain in the ODI format. His consistency with the bat makes him indispensable.With incumbent Rohit Sharma not being a certainty for the 2027 ODI World Cup in South Africa, there are murmurs in the board that if a new captain had to take charge, he should get a fair time to shape the ODI team according to his philosophies. India don’t play much ODI cricket in the build-up to the 2027 World Cup.
