Shubman Gill is as easy-going a person as he is a silky smooth batter. It shows in the posts on cricket and style that make up his Instagram feed. One of his earliest, in 2014, was a couple of mirror selfies taken in a hoodie and a cap worn backwards, with a caption about how he is “not special… just a limited edition”. A post from last month shows a relaxed Gill reclining in a hotel room, flashing a grin, with the caption: “Own lane, own pace, own race.”
(Image courtesy Cornerstone)
Here’s a 23-year-old, billed for a long time as Indian cricket’s next big sensation and rapidly erasing that “next”, who is comfortable in his game and also in his skin. He’s a boy from Punjab with a job to do, and he knows just what it is.
But if he’s comfortable, he’s far from content. In Indore, after the final ODI against New Zealand last month, Gill engaged Rahul Dravid, the current head coach for the national team, in a chat for the Indian cricket board’s web platform, bcci.tv. Dravid started the conversation with an anecdote about Gill’s father, Lakhwinder Singh, a wealthy farmer from Fazilka district. The senior Gill had been talking about his son’s trend of scoring 50s and 60s, richly pleasing but not eye-popping enough. Dravid chuckled and went on to narrate the story of how Singh Sr said: “Shubman, are you only going to show us drizzles or some rain and thunderstorms too?” Your father will be glad, Dravid added. “Over the last month or so, you’ve really made it rain.”
Gill smiled, but responded with less enthusiasm. “I don’t think he’ll be too happy about this game. I should have carried on.” This was after he scored 112; a double century a couple of ODIs before it; and 116 against Sri Lanka in a match before that. All in the few months since his first Test century, against Bangladesh, in December.
So, comfortable, but far from content.
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“What really drives me is being able to see how often and how consistently I can keep performing. How repetitively and for how long I can keep doing my best. Just that curiosity drives me,” Gill tells HT.
His tryst with cricket began early, courtesy his father. As soon as the little boy could bat, Lakhwinder Singh began testing his limits. He would throw scores of balls to his eager son each evening, and when the boy showed promise, the family (including mother Keart Gill, a homemaker, and sister Shahneel Gill) moved to Mohali temporarily so that Shubman could enrol in a cricket academy by age eight.
His childhood coach Sukhwinder Tinku, a former India U19 cricketer, remembers a little boy who clearly had a gift. Tinku says it was Gill’s age-defying maturity that enabled him to do anything he was shown, after one demonstration. He also had an innate skill for middling the ball. “No matter how he swung his bat, he would middle the ball,” Tinku said.
It would be a long time before that 145-kmph ripper came about. But while other young players drifted away after facing early roadblocks, Gill marched on.
“There were a couple of times I tried to convey to his father that maybe he could look at something else for his son. But he told me, ‘Nahi, he will not quit’,” Tinku says. “From the time he was an eight-year-old, it must have been set in his mind that this was his future. Shubman kept his journey going.”
It wasn’t just perseverance. It was an insatiable hunger, Tinku adds. Gill chased runs and new milestones like his life depended on it. He brushed off failure, and worked like a beast to replicate success.
Gill first made headlines at 14, when he racked up 351 in a record 587-run opening stand with Nirmal Singh in a Punjab U16 interdistrict game. He returned to the academy to murmurs that it was easy enough to do, in a space as small as the ground he played on.
“The next match, we played at a bigger ground, and he scored 400,” Tinku said. “Bas, yehi thi baat uss bacche mein (That’s what was special about the kid).”
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The rise in Gill’s career graph has been as seamless as his back-foot play. After a double century on his U16 debut for Punjab in the Vijay Merchant Trophy, Gill stood out in the 2018 ICC U19 World Cup campaign, making 372 runs at an average of 124, helping the team to a memorable win. He was snapped up by Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League (IPL) auctions that year. He helped Gujarat Titans to their IPL title in 2022.
Gill is now the youngest male double-centurion in the ODI format, with his 208 in the first ODI against New Zealand last month. His 91 in the second innings of the final Test against Australia at the Gabba set up India’s chase and series win Down Under in 2020-21. His Test debut was two matches earlier, in the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne in 2020, on the back of the team’s nightmarish 36 all out in Adelaide.
You can see that he’s still working like a beast to be better, Tinku says, using all his fast-learning traits to correct mistakes and bounce back from failures. Or experiences, as Gill likes to call them.
“Something I read once that really stuck with me said: What really makes an experienced player is if you play 50 or 100 matches and you learn from each one. If you don’t, that kind of experience takes you nowhere,” Gill said.
His learning curve has been sharp. He is already being described as a successor to Virat Kohli. Shikhar Dhawan has said he sees in him a bit of the stylish batter that Rohit Sharma is. All the flattering parallels point to a meteoric rise in the offing.
But Gill, the batter and the person, remains unruffled.
“I’m pretty much the same kind of person I was four or five years ago.” What he does miss, he adds, are “the simple pleasures” of moving about without being noticed. “It can get a bit too much sometimes, when you just want to go out with your family or have a good time with friends.”
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