After edging a ball from a net bowler to the slips, Shubman Gill changed his bat. The first one seemed cursed. He was sweet-spotting the drives, forward-defending gracefully, but was miscuing the big shots. A couple of attempted lofted drives wobbled in the air. A short-arm pull had not the usual sting. So he took the second bat he had kept behind the stumps.
A few defensive blocks were perfect, the front foot leaning elegantly, the bat flow smooth and the head statue-still, like the batsman he was during the Test series in England. But expansive strokes still eluded the meat of the blade.
But Gill was not to give up. He decided to change the nets. Both were occupied, he had to wait. He soaked a few balls when Tilak Varma went to grab a bottle of water. But his return sent him back to the queue. He waited impatiently, shadow-batting and checking his pads.
Shortly, he had his third burst of nets, as brief as the first in this nets. This time, he kept the big strokes away, instead just drove the balls along the ground, a flat-batted pull aside. The routine would continue. Each batsman would face a dozen or so balls and exchange strikes.
In the third entry, though, Gill finally began to time the ball. A flat straight six, Virender Sehwag style, off a short ball thundered into the sightscreen. The net bowler dropped his length and he slapped him into the sombre skyline.
Gill clanked into T20 mode, lifting the balls deliciously over extra cover. One left an indentation on the cream wall of the ICC Academy building. An aerial flick dumped the ball in the school compound nearby. By now, he had shrugged off the T20 rust and looked ready to reclaim his spot in the XI a year after his last T20I for his country.
Towards the end of the session, Gill was in such sumptuous nick that Tilak unstrapped his pad and kept watching him pull out the whole spread of strokes from his basket. Not just Tilak, Gill held most of those in the ground glued to him. He showed the twinkling toes of a dancer, sashaying out of the crease to swing the ball through extra cover, or going deep into the crease to pull them. The smaller dimensions of the ground meant that several balls were lost. A reverse-paddle was not far away, even though he missed it altogether.
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But Gill was not worried this time, for he had reached closer to his zone than when he had begun to bat in intolerable humidity, infrequently interspersed by a gust of warm wind. And he left the field a content man, plastering a big warm smile.
Arshdeep finds (bat) swing
The first to bat in the nets was Arshdeep Singh. But rather than looking to hit the ball out of the park, as are his ambitions in the rare times he gets to bat, he was largely practising the defensive strokes, besides gliding and nudging the ball.
But soon after he was struck on the pads and lost his balance, he began to brandish the long handle more liberally. He timed a couple of gorgeous lofted drives down the ground, duly holding his pose. He was soon tested with short balls, which he awkwardly pulled and miscued. As his confidence grew after middling a few shots, he tried to impersonate a helicopter shot with a whirr of the bottom hand. It rollicked to the picket fence, provoking scattered applause from his teammates. Then like all lower-order hands, he had to be coaxed out of the nets, but after almost an hour of swing, sometimes miss, and then bigger swing.
Abhishek’s tennis ball drills
Abhishek Sharma does not have a storied weakness against the short ball. But he knows fast bowlers would try to bounce him out. So, after a six-hitting spree with the hard ball, he asked the net bowlers to go short at him with the tennis ball. Really short, almost pounding the ball halfway down the wicket. He connected with most, even though some balls held up, perhaps owing to sweat from the bowlers’ palms. He waited patiently until the balls fully reached him. Short balls on these wickets could hold up rather than fizz through, where batsmen could swipe prematurely at the short balls and end up miscuing them. He had placed three fielders on the leg-side, so that he gets a sense of placement.
