A Tightrope Walk Awaits Shubman Gill

The England series will indicate how the Test captain stands up in the face of a team that needs some serious building

- Rudraneil Sengupta

Has Shubman Gill been thrown into the deep end with nothing more than a rubber duckie as flotation aid? The clean-cut, square-jawed, calm-eyed, close-shaved 25-year-old with 8% body fat has been given the highest honour in cricket, that of leading his country in Tests, and he begins his tenure with one of the toughest, most keenly watched assignments in Indian cricket—a five-match Test tour of England beginning 20 June.

If the importance of the series is not enough of a challenge, Gill will be leading a team not so much in transition as it is in radical overhaul.

This is the first Test series post the retirements of three of India's biggest names in Test cricket in the past decade—Virat Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin and Rohit Sharma. That leaves a team with a largely unproven batting order: opening duties will fall to the young Yashasvi Jaiswal, all of 19 Tests old, but in tremendous form, and Abhimanyu Easwaran, who is yet to make his debut. The rest of the batters include Gill himself, who averages in the middling mid-30s, and just over a year back was struggling to justify his place in the squad; a first-time call-up for Sai Sudharsan not for First Class credentials but courtesy his white-ball breakthroughs; and a callback from the wilderness for Karun Nair who has been unceremoniously ignored for nearly a decade despite becoming India's second triple-centurion in only his third Test in 2016 (he would play only three more Tests that year before being forgotten). That leaves Gill with only two batters with experience—K.L. Rahul and Rishabh Pant, who is still on the path to rediscovering his old form after a terrifying car crash in 2022 left him out of the game for over a year.