Birmingham:Shubman Gill played his first false shot of the day about an hour and a half before stumps on Day Four. Shoaib Bashir’s delivery gripped and kicked off the surface and got big on Gill, who got the leading edge and offered a simple catch back to the bowler. By then he had plundered 161 off 162 balls, run the England team ragged and ensured that India had all but batted the hosts out of the game.In doing so, Gill finished the Edgbaston Test with 430 runs off 549 balls in 752 minutes of exquisite batting across two innings. Gill has been branded as a ‘prince’ in India cricket and he confirmed his status as batting royalty in contemporary Test cricket.The partisan Edgbaston crowd gave him a raucous applause as he headed to the dressing room. But in a matter of seconds, it started booing as Nitish Kumar Reddy jogged out to bat with India already 591 runs ahead in the second Test.The crowd had already started chanting “borrriiinng, borrriiing” when Gill carried on batting even after bringing up his 150. It went on till the time India declared at 427/6, with Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar unbeaten on 69 and 12 respectively, leaving the English batting 608 runs to chase with an hour and an entire day’s play to go.The extra time taken to bat England out of the game appeared not to matter as pacers Mohammed Siraj and Akash Deep got into the act immediately, taking out Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Joe Root late in the day. England ended at 72/3 at stumps and are staring down the barrel in this Test.The crowd’s reaction at the back end of Gill’s innings could be interpreted as a reflection of the mindset of the English team — exhausted and frustrated. The hosts had endured classical Test batting in testing conditions by overnight batters KL Rahul and Karun Nair, the imperious presence of Gill, Rishabh Pant’s manic 65 off 58 and Jadeja’s comfortable two hours of batting. By the end of the innings, almost all fielders at the boundary were struggling to pick the ball and were running in wrong directions.
Dense clouds and blustery winds welcomed both teams at the start of the day. The overhead conditions, preceded by persistent overnight drizzle, offered the most challenging conditions yet for batters in this Test. India may have been 244 ahead with nine wickets in hand going into the fourth day, but Rahul and Nair had to deal with the moving ball for an hour.The Indian dressing room, having endured a brutal English run chase in the first Test, could not breathe easy even after Rahul fell for a pleasant 55 after Nair’s indifferent 26.Out came Pant and the game moved at a blink-and miss rate. With his outrageous hitting and Gill’s sublime strokeplay at the other end, they pinned England down.Bizarre field settings and bowling tactics were matched by outlandish batting by both Pant and Gill. Pant walked out to bat with a license to kill. It may never be established if the team management issued it to him. He was dead set on depositing the ball into the crowd. After a boundary and six to get off the mark, he drilled Stokes to Crawley at mid-off only to be put down.Such was the pressure exerted by Pant in his knock, which had three thunderous sixes and eight boundaries, that Stokes started setting funny fields to even Gill. Gill was in a zone where he could pick any spot in the field and reach the boundary. In a passage of play that could be best described as street cricket, with England resorting to setting a 6:3 field on the leg side, Gill moved around the crease like a bully and accessed different parts of the field.Once Pant was dismissed in a bizarre way, the bat flying to mid-wicket as he mistimed Bashir to long-off, conventional cricket returned.
