How Shubman Gill stood out from other Indians at Melbourne nets

Of all the Indian players that batted in the nets on Sunday at the MCG, Shubman Gill stood out with his unique approach. He kept taking different stances at the crease, depending on the bowler. The others were trying to nail down their approach, their stance, either trying to lean forward or push back or whatever little thing they were working on. But fundamentally, the position where they stood initially remained the same. Not Gill, though.At times, he would stand well outside the crease and move back and across to end up with his back foot on the popping crease. To other bowlers, he would start standing, cutting the crease or even inside, and pushing further back close to the stumps. Since a variety of bowlers operate at the same net, Gill was changing every ball, basically. It was quite something to watch.
He started facing the throwdown specials, and even with them, depending on their pace and lengths he wanted them to bowl, he had started moving around. But additionally, he did one act with a throwdown-er, the left-handed Nuwan from Sri Lanka.
Standing with both feet just outside the crease, he would press back. He had already asked the thrower to bowl full-pitched deliveries. Even as the balls kept landing pretty full or full-length, from his position just behind the crease, he would play them without any further feet movement. Just the knee-flex and the hands.
Was it for Mitch Starc’s deliveries, when they are pitched up? Gill doesn’t naturally lean into drives, and this time around, he wasn’t even making the effort against those full balls. He would press back and let his hands go through the line of the full-length deliveries. At Adelaide, he had been dismissed with a really full delivery when he played across the line to Starc, a dismissal that pushed India into crisis mode. These balls he faced here were that sort of a length. He is a batsman who was raised on cement pitches and his backfoot play has developed from those days. So, the pacers across the world try to mix in a full ball now and then, to try to catch him off guard. Eventually satisfied with his batting against those deliveries, he went to different nets with regular bowlers – with both Indians and a local net bowler – and did his thing.
To Prasidh Krishna who likes to hit the deck, he would start with his backfoot on the crease and push back inside the crease to punch. To the net bowler, he stood outside the crease and leaned forward to drive or stand tall and punch. To the nippy Akash Deep, he would end up inside the crease and try to see if he could punch or tap. To Mohammad Siraj, he went back but perhaps not as much as he did to Prasidh.
He began the back movement as the bowler left the green-grassy area of the outfield and started to enter the turf area that extended beyond the stumps. Punch, tap, drive, clip, and the occasional pull.
The net pitches at the MCG weren’t of great quality, it must be said. Pitches with variable bounce. “Think they were made for white-ball cricket,” Akash Deep would say later, in particular talking about the lack of bounce on them. Occasionally, the balls would skid or keep low.
Like this one time when Rohit Sharma shaped to pull a ball from throwdown special Daya. It never kicked up as high as he expected it to, the ball skidded well below the flashing blade to crash into his left knee. He let out a cry of agony, and soon was sat on the plastic chair at one end, applying an ice pack on his knee. A short while later, the bowling coach Morne Morkel went across to him, and Rohit got up and replayed the sequence of how he got hurt, replete with the pained cry.
Rohit was in quite a fun mood at the nets. At one point, when he was done in a skiddy delivery from Akash Deep and hit on the body, he adopted the Bihari twang and went, “Bhaiyaa! Humko maarogey?! (Brother, you will hit me?!). Akash, who hails from Bihar and has risen against odds from there, flashed a big smile. On the upper tier, the fans watching the training laughed. “Achaa laga, (It felt good)!” Akash would say later about Rohit putting him at ease in that fashion.
Virat Kohli continued with the approach he showed on Saturday, trying to shoulder arms to balls away from the off stump as much as possible; he also called Yashasvi Jaiswal, who was batting in an adjacent net, and had a reasonably long chat. And as Jaiswal faced the next ball, Kohli watched him carefully, threw in a word of encouragement, and resumed his batting. Akash also got hit on his arm while batting and would brush it off later saying all this is part of the game, nothing serious. Neither his nor Rohit’s.
All in all, an interesting training day at the MCG nets, in particular in the way Gill went about his batting.

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