Indian head coach Gautam Gambhir has revealed that he told Shubman Gill that he had passed the hardest test in the team’s transition after his side won the fifth and final Test at The Oval. The 43-year-old said that he told Gill that the transition would only get easier after the 2-2 draw in England, adding he was not surprised by the right-hander’s golden run with the bat in the series.
Gill amassed 754 runs in 10 innings with four centuries, including a hundred in each innings in the second Test at Edgbaston.
“He has passed his most difficult test, and I told him after we won at The Oval, I told him that he just passed his most difficult test in the transition, and from here on, things will be much easier. I hope they get more easier for him because he deserves every bit of it. The amount of criticism he has received, the kind of things people have said about him, it has been unfair. You can’t expect a 25-year-old kid to have an average of 50, and score every time everywhere. The kind of potential he has, I was never shocked that he scored 750 runs in England,” Gambhir told JioHotstar in an interview.
Gambhir also said that he never saw Gill show any kind of pressure during the course of the five-Test series in England. He added that Gill, the captain, was still a work in progress, and he would be there to support in whichever way possible.
“It is still very early days of his captaincy; he has only captained 6 Test matches so far. The first and foremost thing I can say about him is handling the pressure. If you ask me, he will keep growing, he is still a work in progress. He still has not seen the worst days in his captaincy tenure, and it will happen. It will happen someday, he is now the one day captain as well”.
“So I actually want to see, when things does not go his way, how he reacts to that. I’ve always told him that I am there to support him, protect him. My job is to take all the pressure off him, I am ready to take all the criticism for him, till the time he is doing all the right things for the team, till the time he is absolutely transparent and honest to the players in the dressing room, that is the only way to earn respect. So far he has been brilliant. He has ticked all the boxes, what more can a coach ask for from a captain?,” the former India opening batter said.
