Former England captain Alastair Cook has said that Shubman Gill was “I imagine felt shell-shocked” as a captain during England’s successful final-day chase in the first Test at Leeds. England chased down 371, 350 of it came on the final day, as Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley pummelled the Indian bowlers.
Cook notes that near the end of the game, Gill had taken backseat, letting others to handle the captaincy calls.
“You could see lots of people out on the field making decisions and getting involved with DRS calls, and they got all of those wrong. You can read all the leadership books you like but until you are out there, there is no other feeling like it. I imagine he [Gill] would have felt shell-shocked,” Cook wrote in his column in UK newspaper The Sunday Times.
Cook also made a point that Gill slipped up in India’s second innings, in the evening of the fourth day’s play.
“I think in India’s second innings a more established captain might have thought ‘we’re 340 ahead and five down, let’s put some pressure on England’. As it was they were bowled out with a lead of just over 370 anyway, but it might have helped their situation to have attacked a bit more.”
He also wrote about how Gill could have tried a few different things in England’s second-innings chase.
“I thought Jadeja could have bowled into the rough slightly slower — instead he bowled in the way he might have done in India. I sympathised with the India captain, Shubman Gill, in that fourth innings. I felt India could have tried more things. They could have had a go with a 7-2 offside field or tried bouncer warfare,” Gill wrote.
Story continues below this ad
Looking ahead, Cook had couple of suggestions for the playing XI of India for the second Test at Birmingham.
“They might have to leave out either Karun Nair and Sai Sudharsan and play Nitish Kumar Reddy, who can bat and also bowl some phantom seamers, and then they can play Kuldeep Yadav as an extra spinner.”
A few days ago, another former England captain Nasser Hussain too had made similar observations on Gill the captain.
“I saw someone finding his way. He [Gill] didn’t quite have that on-field aura of Rohit and Virat Kohli. I thought he followed the ball a lot and was reactive rather than proactive,” Hussain said on Sky Sports. “When Rohit and Kohli captained, you looked down and you immediately knew who was in charge but when I looked down in this game I saw two or three captains, captaincy by committee.”
