Credit: X
While assessing the Indian captain Shubhman Gill, former England captain Nasser Hussain compared him to former captains of the Indian Test team Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. Hussain said, “Shubhman Gill lacks aura like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli.” He further added, “I thought he followed the ball a lot and he was reactive rather than being proactive.” Nasser also said that when Rohit and Kohli captained you looked down and you immediately knew who was in charge but when I looked down in this game I saw two or three captains, captains by committee.
Nasser Hussain delivered this extremely critical verdict post Indian cricket team’s loss to England in the first test match of the Tendulkar Anderson Trophy. This match was played at Leeds and it marked Shubhman Gill’s first match as captain of the Indian cricket team in the red ball format. "There were a lot of captains, it was a bit of captaincy by committee, which can happen in your early days as a leader because your senior players like Rishabh Pant or KL Rahul want to help you out as much as possible,” Hussain further added.
India aim to fightback in Birmingham
After giving the hosts a target of 371, India entered Day 5 of the match as utter favourites. Alas, their suboptimal bowling, fielding and the extraordinary 188 opening stand of Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett with the bat took the game out of India’s hand. The Barmy Army faced some speed breakers when Indian bowlers like Shardul Thakur, Prasidh Krishna and Ravindra Jadeja inflicted some damage. But Jamie Smith and Joe Root stood tall and finished the game for England.
However, the match saw a good batting performance from the Indian camp as well. In the first innings of the game, Yashasvi Jaiswal slammed a century which was the highest score by an Indian opening batsman on the English soil. Joining him in the party was skipper Shubhman Gill who joined the elite list of being the 4th Indian captains to score a ton on Test debut as a captain. In the third innings as well, KL Rahul scored a hundred and surpassed cricketing greats like Sunil Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid, when he scored his 3rd test century in England as the latter one had two each. Now, the second Test match of the series will be played in Birmingham from July 2 to 6 and India will be looking to make a comeback with a big win in the next game.
