For reasons that are never fully clear, cricket people gush about the aesthetics of left-handers. Left-handed cover drives are better. Left-handed late cuts are more languid. Shubman Gill is the right-handed version of a left-hander. Aside from the odd dismissal like the Indore Test, he makes all his shots look effortless. He is tall, slender, graceful, bending in the breeze, someone made of willow more than the bat that’s in his hand. He has the power that comes of tensile strength, slimness that snaps back into shape and brings to bear all the force of that movement.
Halfway through the third day of the Ahmedabad Test between India and Australia, as the series finale wound its way along in the severest afternoon heat, Cameron Green tried bowling a bouncer. Gill’s pull shot cracked it away. Only for a run, but it brought to mind the pulls that Green had smashed the day before on his way to a century. This run took Gill to 80. In Green’s next over, Gill lashed two in a row through the covers. Soon enough they were both in the hundred club on Indian soil.
