India captain Shubman Gill said that while it is always tempting to include a wicket taking spinner like Kuldeep Yadav in the playing XI, the team added Washington Sundar in the second Test at Edgbaston vs England in order to add batting depth. The team had copped a lot of flak due to the non inclusion of Kuldeep for the second Test but their decision to go with Sundar paid off eventually with the allrounder chipping in with the bat as well as the ball in different junctures in the match.
“It’s very tempting when you have a bowler like Kuldeep. One of the reasons why I wanted to play Washington was because he gives us the batting depth. And the first thing is, I think the partnership between me and Washington is very important. If there was no partnership, then I think our lead would have been 70-80-90 runs, which is psychologically very different from 180 run lead,” Gill said after India defeated England by 336 runs and tied the series 1-1.
Gill also feels the spinners give more control than pacers when the Dukes ball gets soft and unresponsive.
“As much as we expected, even on the fifth day, the ball was not moving that much from the middle, it was just moving from the rough. We thought that…maybe on our fifth day, a spinner will give us more control if the ball is moving from the wicket. And especially on such (flat) wickets, sometimes spin gives you more control than fast bowling. So that was our mindset,” he said explaining the rationale behind Sundar and Ravindra Jadeja’s inclusion.
Gill also came across as a calm and composed captain as he didn’t read too much into the reversal at Headingley, a match they controlled for large portions, saying that they won’t be dropping as many catches as they did there in every game.
“All the things we spoke about after the last game, we were spot on with all of those things. I think the way we came back with our bowling and fielding was tremendous to see. On this kind of wicket we knew that if we got 400-500 runs, it would be enough,” Gill told former England skipper Nasser Hussain after the game.
