Chak Khere To Leeds Via Mohali

T was just after 7AM on June 1. As Mohali and the rest of India were waking up on a lazy Sunday morning, the park behind the IS Bindra Stadium was buzzing.

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As one walked past what is now the old Punjab Cricket Association Stadium, the park, developed and maintained by the District Cricket Association Mohali, was swarming with people.

On one side of the park, which is essentially a vast ground with nets along the walls of the Bindra stadium, a tennis ball cricket game was on. Along the pavement parents were waiting, chit-chatting, as their children stood as a group near the nets with a couple of coaches. This is not an unusual sight at this ground. In fact, it is at this ground, and one of these nets along the walls of the IS Bindra Stadium, Shubman Gill—India's Test captain—was first spotted as a talent when he was not even a teenager.

Around 15 years ago, former India cricketer Karsan Ghavri was in Mohali for a fast bowling camp organised by the BCCI. During the camp, one day the training was cancelled due to rain. Ghavri and his assistant coach, Yoginder Puri, took a stroll around the stadium and ended up at the ground behind.

That is where Ghavri saw a lanky boy, who was around 12, batting in the nets. Impressed by his sound technique and solid defence, Ghavri talked to someone sitting there. "I asked him, 'Who is that boy?', and he said, 'That is my son'," Ghavri recalls his first conversation with Lakhwinder Singh, Shubman's father. Ghavri asked Lakhwinder to bring Shubman to the camp the next day. "It was a U16 fast bowling camp, and he was facing the bowlers like 16 or 17. He was just 11 or 12 then. He used to come and train with our boys, bat for long periods. He stood out," says Ghavri.

Soon, the former India cricketer asked Sushil Kapoor, who was with the PCA at the time, to include Shubman in the U14 Punjab team. And that marked the beginning of the folklore about a teen prodigy plundering runs across age-groups before rising through the ranks.