In this series, I am trying to bat like I used to in my childhood: Shubman Gill

Indian Test captain Shubman Gill has stated that he has worked on his initial movement and set-up in his batting technique ahead of the England tour in order to improve his overall gameplay of scoring runs in the longest format of the game.

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Notably, Gill went on to score 269 runs, his career-highest, against England on Day 2 of the ongoing Birmingham Test to emerge as the second youngest Indian skipper to hit a Test double ton after Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and also turned out to be the first Asian captain to score a double hundred in SENA countries.

“I mainly worked on my initial movement and my setup. Before this, I felt my batting was going well. I was scoring 30-35-40 runs consistently in Test matches. But at some point, I was missing that peak concentration time. A lot of people say that when you focus too much, you sometimes miss your peak time,” Shubman Gill said at the post-day press conference.

“So, in this series, I tried to go back to my basics. I tried to bat like I used to in my childhood. I didn’t think about having reached 35-40 runs or about playing long innings. I just wanted to enjoy my batting,” he added.

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“Sometimes, when you aren’t scoring runs fluently, you stop enjoying your batting. You focus too much on the need to score runs. I felt I had lost that in my batting. I was so focused that I wasn’t enjoying my batting as much,” he stated.

It’s important to note that Gill’s double ton was also the first by an Indian batter in an away Test series since Virat Kohli’s in 2016. Interestingly, his 269-run knock turned out to be the highest-ever by an Indian Test captain.

Furthermore, Gill asserted that he received a piece of advice from the head coach Gautam Gambhir when he wasn’t able to convert his runs into boundaries on Day 1 of the ongoing Test.

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“When I went in to bat before lunch on the first day, at tea I was on around 35-40 runs off about 100 balls. I came out and spoke to GG (Gautam Gambhir) Bhai. I told him, ‘I’m not running freely, even though I have a lot of shots in my armoury.’ I also felt the ball was a bit soft’. He asked me to hang in there,” Gill observed.

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