India vs England: Nostalgia’s Easy To Sell, Yet, Gill Must Channel Kohli’s Hell

India vs England: Not every captain has to be Virat Kohli. But, India needs Shubman Gill to bring out the fire.

India vs England, 1st Test: Why Shubman Gill must channel his inner Virat Kohli.

(Photo: PTI)

It was only the first session of Day 5, and no prediction model, regardless of how sophisticated or advanced it was, could accurately predict, at that specific point, the outcome of the first England-India Test.

Yet, that, the English openers seemed unflustered despite the target being steep, was not too promising a sign for the visitors. Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley were not exactly ‘cruising’ in the 371-run chase early in the day, granted, but they sure were ‘chipping away.’ For those attuned to the undercurrents of a game, the signs were faint but unmistakable: India needed a shift. A spark. A fightback.

Ravi Shastri has a penchant for those moments. He has been at the dugout during g***-muh-meh-the times, by his own admission. He knew India needed something — a glimmer of hope, a modicum of turning tides.

Now back in the commentary box, his voice crackled with clarity: “India needs someone to do the Kohli job.”

In simpler terms, they needed to be on the English openers’ face. Be it brash and abrasive, be it at the home of the self-proclaimed custodians of the game’s gentlemanly veneer.

The Hell That Went Missing at Headingly

Perhaps, Shastri was harking back to the Lord’s game from 2021, which he had overseen as India’s coach. An 89-run ninth-wicket stand between Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah — prima facie — saved India from a defeat.

England, then, had 272 runs to chase in two-thirds of Day 5. And Kohli wouldn’t take a draw for a result. He wasn’t the man for shared spoils.

In the now-legendary team huddle, his instructions were searing: "I should not see anyone smiling. For 60 overs, they should feel hell."

They, that is, England, did, in fact, feel hell, as they were bowled out for 120. Reminiscing the match, and Kohli, former English cricketer Nasser Hussain said on Sky Sports:

In the hurdle that last morning at Lord's when England were trying to chase the score, Kohli was in the hurdle pointing at every Indian player telling them to unleash hell on that England batting lineup for 60 overs. That is what his side did. That side became the mirror image of Virat's character. Test match cricket is so much better when Kohli was playing. We will move on. We moved from Gavaskar to Tendulkar to Kohli and maybe to Gill. But Kohli added so much to this game.

Nasser Hussain

His assessment of Shubman Gill’s captaincy after the Headlingley Test was:

Shubman Gill didn’t quite have that on-field aura. I looked down from the press box, the commentary position, there were a lot of captains; it was a bit captaincy by committee, which can happen in your early days as a leader because you’re still senior players like Rishabh Pant and KL Rahul want to try and help you out as much as possible. I thought he followed the ball a lot. I thought he was reactive, as opposed to proactive.

Nasser Hussain

If Shastri was indeed drawing parallels to Kohli’s Lord’s antics, a realisation dawned upon him soon enough to correct his statement. There wasn’t any figure to impose restrictions on smiling. Quite the contrary, rather, as hardly had he stopped remembering Kohli’s aggression that the camera panned on Gill, who happened to have been smiling at that very instance.

‘There’s no one player in the team who can do the Kohli role, actually. They should have three guys to do that,’ announced Shastri, as he came to terms with the new normal.

Parallelism Will Be Trivial...

No, there’s no harm in smiling. To pretend that all sport is war, that all athletes are warriors, is to romanticize beyond reason. The eleven men wearing the BCCI crest are not auditioning for Ridley Scott’s next Gladiator film — a film, frankly, Scott ought to leave well enough alone, but that’s another story.

Gautam Gambhir can continue to bang the drums of vigorous, at times rigorous, hyper-patriotism, as if he is in a one-man marching band. Kid you not, the ‘we represent 140 crore proud Indians’ line was invoked again yesterday! At this point, the RGCCI may as well expedite the next Indian census so Gambhir can update his figures with statistical accuracy.

But in reality, in true Gen Z fashion — it is not that deep.

Michael Vaughan believes England are thriving precisely because they don’t treat Test cricket as a war.

Ben and Baz have created a fantastic vibe around the group. They were smiling, having a laugh, they seem to be able to play as a group as if they are in their back garden. It’s an amazing mentality to have.

Michael Vaughan

...But No Harm in Following Precedents

Moral of the story being — there’s no harm in smiling. No harm in being Shubman Gill. No harm in not being Virat Kohli.

What did cause harm to India in Leeds, though, was not the lack of unbridled aggression, but the lack of imaginative impetus. England’s chase — 350 on Day 5, the second-highest in Test history — was aided by India’s passivity. The bowling changes were sluggish. The field placements lacked initiative.

Take the instance of when Ben Duckett kept on reverse-sweeping Ravindra Jadeja, and there was no fielder to be seen at deep cover or deep point.

Or, for that matter, how Jadeja seemingly kept it orthodox by keeping it stumps-to-stumps, when in fact, the roughs were on the line of sixth-seventh stumps.

Or, easing deployment on the slip cordon when bowlers who were not named Jasprit Bumrah were bowling. Or, not giving Bumrah the second new ball, because by his own admission, England were 20-odd from the target so he did not feel the need to.

More often than not, India’s leadership looked like a collaborative patchwork — Pant, Rahul, Jadeja — all weighing in. Perhaps, for Gill’s maiden Test as captain, this was inevitable.

As Gambhir aptly put it, the 25-year-old was pushed to the sea.

Look, first Test match, obviously, there are nerves. These are tough places to captain. It’s like pushing someone into the deep sea, and I am sure he is going to come out as a proper professional.

Gautam Gambhir

Gambhir later went on to praise Gill for his batting. Indeed, the series scoreline might not glorify it, but let it not be brushed under the carpet that a youngster, who was playing U-19 cricket not very long ago, scored a century on his Test captaincy debut. That too, against England, be it against a depleted bowling attack.

Channel the Lost Hell

Revisionism is seldom fruitful. In India, especially, it attains addictive levels, as it gets laced with nostalgia. Much of our cultural body of work is centered around that lover who left, that person who was once ours but isn’t now, that place we once were at but aren’t now.

As if the nation is trapped in a Lord Huron song, humming ‘I had all, and then, most of you. Some, and now, none of you.’

In cricket, as it is in life, the only true solution is moving on. Yet, in cricket, as it is in life, you can hold on to constructive attributes from the past, so long holding on doesn’t hurt.

For India, holding on to ‘Kohli’s Hell’ wouldn’t hurt. The question is — do they have anyone to unleash hell?