Shubman Gill & Co: From no-hopers to toast of the nation after drawn series

Who wrote the script for this Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy? This must have been the overriding question in cricket fans’ minds when Mohammed Siraj’s peach of a yorker crashed onto Gus Atkinson’s stumps — giving India a Test win by the narrowest of margins at The Oval and finish the master thriller of a series 2-2.

A score line which would have been impossible to fathom when Shubman Gill & Co. embarked on their campaign in the five-Test series one and-a-half months back, with one of the most inexperienced teams to have ever left India's shores. A new 25-year-old captain with a previous Test average of 14-plus in England; no Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ravi Ashwin, Mohammed Shami, and a rider that Jasprit Bumrah would not be playing more than three Tests.

With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that India could well have finished on the winning side with a few tweaks in personnel as well as on the tactical front. But then, this was a nerve-wracking series where the new look team believed in itself, continued to learn on the job and more importantly, everyone put their hands up to be counted rather than depending on star power.

A balance sheet of Indian performances — primarily with the bat — drives home the point. It’s for the first time in a five-Test series that there have been as many as 12 centuries by Indian batters — Gill (four), K.L. Rahul, Rishabh Pant, and Yashasvi Jaiswal (two each), Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar (one each) — while five batters scored more than 400 runs.

Talk about bowling, the lionhearted Siraj finally stepped out of Bumrah’s shadows as the highest wicket-taker of the series (23 wickets) while the senior pace ace had done his bit with 14 wickets from three Tests.

‘’Never give up,’’ was captain Gill’s biggest takeaway from the series in a post-match chat, and each of his team members actually walked the talk. Be it the way Jadeja and Sundar hung around for two sessions to clinch an improbable draw at the fourth Test at Old Trafford so that India lived to fight another day, or a phase on Day Four at The Oval when Joe Root and Harry Brook were running away with the chase after the latter got a ‘life’ on the ropes thanks ironically to Siraj, this determined lot simply refused to give up.

It was animated head coach Gautam Gambhir, inscrutable at the best of times, who embraced Gill tightly after the game. The pressure on an under-fire Gambhir, under whom the team managed to squeeze in only one Test win in eight games before this series, was palpably greater than the players. Not only was rookie captain Gill deemed to be ‘his’ choice, there are no prizes for guessing that he was also tasked with shedding the superstar culture in the team. 

The memories of a so-called divided dressing room during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy last yearend suddenly seemed a thing of the past. Yes, it could have been a different story if England, who only had 35 runs to get on the last day with three wickets in hand, had gone over the line and the hosts ended the series with a 3-1 sweep. The stubbornness in keeping a quality wrist spinner like Kuldeep Yadav on the sidelines, not willing to give Abhimanyu Eashwaran at least one go despite Karun Nair and Sai Sudarshan not exactly setting the stage on fire can still be debated, but then, nothing succeeds like success.

While a lot has been written about the seesaw nature of the competition in the series, TV pundit Harsha Bhogle summed it up nicely on Sunday: ‘’Overall, if you add up all the games, it’s a bit like that — one team has won more games, the other more sets.’’ No prizes for guessing the respective sides he was referring to, but then full marks to India for walking away with a tie-breaker of sorts!