Shubman Gill's Test Record and the England Captaincy Series
Shubman GillIndia8 min read
There is a five-year stretch in the middle of Shubman Gill's Test career that nobody would have predicted from either end of it. It begins with a twenty-one-year-old opener holding up an Australian attack in Melbourne and Brisbane, continues through a long run of scores in the twenties and thirties that had selectors and broadcasters arguing about whether he belonged, and finishes with him captaining India in England and scoring more runs in a series than any India captain before him. The middle section is the part most accounts skip. It is also the part that explains the rest.
A debut on Boxing Day, and 91 at the Gabba
Gill's first Test was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 26 December 2020, in the match immediately after India had been bowled out for 36 in Adelaide. He was picked as an opener, and the side he walked into was missing most of its first-choice players. He made 45 and 35 not out in a match India won.
The innings that established him came three weeks later. At the Gabba in January 2021, chasing 328 on the final day in a series decider, Gill made 91 from 146 balls and put on the stand that made the target look reachable. India completed the chase. It was a young side, patched together from injuries, and Gill's contribution was the largest individual score in it. A twenty-one-year-old playing his third Test, batting against a full-strength Australia attack in the fourth innings, is a small enough category that it does most of the work of a reputation on its own.
That is worth holding onto, because for the next four years it was almost the only innings anyone cited.
The problem was never the starts
Between 2021 and 2024 Gill played Test cricket almost continuously and produced a record that irritated people. He got in a great deal. He got out between twenty and forty a great deal. There were long series in which he passed thirty three or four times and never went beyond sixty, and the frustration was sharper because the batting always looked orderly. This was not a player being found out by a particular ball or a particular bowler. It was a player who kept giving away innings that had already been built.
Openers are judged on a harsher scale than anyone else, and the scale was applied. Gill opened in seaming conditions in England, in New Zealand, in South Africa, and the dismissals were unforgiving in the way that dismissals of an opening batter always are. He was also being compared, unavoidably, with the two batters immediately below him in the order. Cheteshwar Pujara occupied the number three position for most of that period as a specialist in occupation rather than tempo, and Rishabh Pant further down was doing something so different that no comparison held. Gill's method sat between them and satisfied nobody.
The hundreds did come, and they came at home. His first was 110 against New Zealand at Ahmedabad in November 2021. Then 128 against Bangladesh at Chattogram in December 2022, and 128 against Australia back at Ahmedabad in March 2023, in a series played in the run-up to the 2021-2023 World Test Championship final. Three hundreds in roughly eighteen months would be a decent return for most players in their early twenties. The complaint was about the other thirty innings.
The Test hundreds
| Score | Opposition | Venue | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 110 | New Zealand | Ahmedabad | November 2021 |
| 128 | Bangladesh | Chattogram | December 2022 |
| 128 | Australia | Ahmedabad | March 2023 |
| 147 | England | Headingley | June 2025 |
| 269 | England | Edgbaston | July 2025 |
| 161 | England | Edgbaston | July 2025 |
Two of the six came in the same match, which is not a normal distribution for a batter's career and says a good deal about how compressed his best red-ball cricket has been.
Moving to number four
The most consequential change in his red-ball career was positional. Gill stopped opening and moved into the middle order at number four, which is the position India had given to their best batter of the previous generation for a decade. The move is easy to justify in retrospect and was contested at the time, mainly by people who pointed out that a batter who cannot handle the new ball is a batter with a technical problem, and that hiding him at four does not fix it.
The counter-case is more practical. Gill's scoring pattern - long, controlled innings built on driving through the off side - had always been better suited to a slightly older ball and a set field than to the first half-hour of a Test. Opening asked him to do the one thing he did least well, and to do it in the conditions where the cost of failure was highest. Batting at four asked him to do the things he did best, and it also solved a selection problem, since India by then had Yashasvi Jaiswal available to open and no obvious replacement in the middle.
Nothing about the move was dramatic. His returns improved gradually rather than suddenly, and the argument about whether the improvement came from the position or simply from being three years older has never been settled. It probably cannot be.
The captaincy, in June 2025
He was given the Test captaincy in June 2025, before the five-match tour of England, at twenty-five. The circumstances made it a larger job than the title suggests. Virat Kohli had retired from the format the previous month, and neither he nor Rohit Sharma was in the touring party. India were going to England in a new World Test Championship cycle with a batting order missing roughly 20,000 Test runs of experience, and asking a captain who had never led in the format to score the bulk of the replacement himself.
There was also the matter of his own record in England, which was poor. Gill had toured before as an opener and had very little to show for it. A captain arriving at a series with a bad away record in those conditions is normally a story about pressure. It became a story about something else.
Headingley, then Edgbaston
He made 147 in the first Test at Headingley, on captaincy debut. India lost the match, which meant the innings was largely filed away as a personal footnote to a defeat, and there is a version of the tour in which that is where it stays.
Edgbaston in July was the second Test and the one that rearranged his career. Gill made 269 in the first innings and 161 in the second, the highest scores of his Test life by a wide margin, and India won the match. It was their first Test victory at the ground. Two hundreds in a Test is uncommon; two hundreds of that size, by a captain in his second match in charge, in a country where he had previously failed, is close to unrepeatable.
What the 269 showed was not a new technique. It was the same batting held together for two days instead of ninety minutes. The drives were the drives he had always played. The difference was the number of times he declined to play them, and the fact that the innings had no obvious phase in which he changed gear or lost patience. Long Test innings are usually built out of restraint rather than range, and this was the first time he had assembled one.
754 runs, and a series that finished level
He finished the series with 754 runs, the largest aggregate any India captain has made in a series. India drew it 2-2. Both facts belong in the same sentence, because the second is what stops the first from being a straightforward triumph.
A drawn series in England is a good result for a side in transition, and it was achieved with a bowling attack that had to be rotated hard across five matches. Mohammed Siraj carried a heavy load in it. But 754 runs from one batter in a drawn series also describes a batting order that was not producing enough elsewhere, and the honest reading of the tour is that India were carried by their captain and were still only level at the end of it. That is a fragile way to draw a series.
There is a comparison worth making with Joe Root, who spent five years captaining England while scoring more heavily than anyone else in the side and won a smaller proportion of matches than his batting deserved. The pattern is common enough to be a known hazard: a captain whose runs mask a structural problem gets credited for the runs and blamed for the structure. Kane Williamson is the counter-example, a captain whose side was built well enough that his own scoring was one contribution among several.
What the record does and does not settle
Gill's Test career now reads as three separate things. There is the 2020-21 Australia tour, which established him at twenty-one. There is the long middle period as an opener, which produced three home hundreds and a great many discarded starts. And there is the England series, which is the most concentrated run of scoring an India batter has produced abroad in some years.
The obvious question is which of the three is the true reading. The unhelpful answer is that it is too early to say, and that the record contains too few away hundreds outside 2025 to call the England tour a settled change rather than a very large outlier. Six Test hundreds is not many for a batter with his volume of innings, and half of them arrived in six weeks.
What has changed is the burden. Gill is now the batter India build a Test innings around, with Ravindra Jadeja below him and a young top order above, and the side has no senior alternative to fall back on. That is a different job from the one he had at the Gabba, and its results will take a good deal longer to read. Set against the history of Indian cricket, where the transition from one batting generation to the next has usually taken several painful years, an inherited order that drew in England at the first attempt is a reasonable start.