Shubman Gill returns to earlier ‘mindset against spin’ to take the fight to the Kiwis
MUMBAI: For Shubman Gill, the end of 2024 is a complete contrast to how it began. Earlier this year, he was still settling into his new batting position at No. 3. Runs were difficult to come by and his spot in the Test squad was being questioned.
Eyebrows were raised because he had last scored a century against Australia in March 2023 in Ahmedabad. Since then, for almost a year, he didn’t cross a half-century in 12 innings, 10 of these innings as a No. 3 batter.
But then came the turnaround with a century in the second Test against England in Vizag. Gill ended up scoring 500-plus runs in that series and since then, his bat has done the talking. In 12 innings after that knock, he has got two tons, two 90s — including one on Saturday — and a fifty.
Gill’s 146-ball 90 and his 96-run stand for the fifth wicket with Rishabh Pant helped India take a slender 27-run first-innings lead which at one point looked like a distant dream, given the way India had crumbled towards the end of the first day’s play. While Pant was going hammer and tongs at one end, Gill looked rock solid at the other.
He put away the loose balls, rotated the strike and made sure that New Zealand spinners couldn’t hit the length they wanted. The only blip in his innings came when as he was nearing his half-century, when he was dropped by Mark Chapman.
The 25-year-old termed Saturday’s knock as one of the better ones in his career, before adding that he dipped into what he had done right in the Test series against England and tried to replicate it.
“It’s definitely one of the better knocks I’ve played in Tests. In this match, it was about working on the areas I had worked on before the England series began. When I was batting in that series, I was batting at my best against spinners. And just to be able to go back into that mindset and what my positions were when I was playing spinners, that’s what I was trying to replicate before this match,” said Gill.
“I was trying to just go out there and have another opportunity to bat for the maximum (time) I could and not put pressure on myself by thinking about how many runs I must score. You don’t get to play that many Tests and I feel that when I’m batting there and putting pressure on myself, then I’m losing out on the fun of the art of batting,” said Gill.
