Former English cricketer David Llyod said that new India skipper Shubman Gill’s captaincy came across as ‘reactive rather than proactive’ in the 1st Test against England at Leeds. India failed to defend 371 runs in the 4th innings with England, courtesy of a century by Ben Duckett, won the match by 5 wickets and took 1-0 lead in the five-match series.
“The intrigue is with Shubman Gill, who’s a very inexperienced skipper. How’s he going to come back from that. He’s got Ravindra Jadeja and Karun Nair, who are in their 30s. So he’s got experience in his team. It’s great having a young team that he’s got. But he’s tactically he’s reactive rather than proactive in the stuff that he’s doing,” Lloyd said on the Stick to Cricket show.
Former England skipper Alastair Cook compared Gill’s ascent as captain to current Three Lions leader Ben Stokes, saying that there is always a phase when the team gets used to the new captain.
“When you take over a team, there will always be a phase when the team gets used to the new leader. This happened with (Ben) Stokes when he came in. It took a while (for England players) to get used to him when he came in and said, ‘We’re going to try and smash every ball,’ Cook said.
Even former India spinner Murali Kartik had said that that multiple players giving instructions in the field in addition to the captain is never a good sign which was what happened on Day 5 of the Headingley Test.
Among the many things that were noted about how India went about their business over the course of the final day of the first Test was the amount of instructions that senior players of the side like KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant were giving after Prasidh Krishna’s strikes in the second session.
“At one point I felt there were too many captains,” said Kartik on Cricbuzz. “I just couldn’t understand that. KL Rahul was making hand movements, Rishabh Pant was also doing it, and so was Shubman Gill who is actually the man appointed as captain. I couldn’t understand those multiple hand signals. You wouldn’t want to complicate things. There is only one captain.”
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“A senior player making slight changes here and there, correcting someone slightly when they feel they are slightly in the wrong position, sending third man or short fine, mid-on, mid-off; these are all fine occasionally. However, so many players taking calls so frequently is not a good sign.”
