Prince is a throwback batter playing the game with patrician disdain to leave England’s bowlers toiling in the heat
For a man who moves so slowly, Shubman Gill can fit a lot into a split second. Gill is one of those rare athletes who works in a different rhythm to the rest of us, so that even when a ball’s coming down at 90mph he seems to be able to take a beat to whistle a bar of Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle while he thinks about what he’s going to order for dinner that evening, finally decides how to meet this latest delivery and then, at the last possible moment, follows through. He is, as any number of players and coaches say, someone you only need to see hit one shot to know exactly how good he is.
England, unfortunately for them, got to watch a lot more than one on the first day of the opening Test.
In style, Gill is a throwback batter. He plays the game with patrician disdain, waiting for the ball like it’s his butler, then, sending it scurrying away with a casual flick of his wrist, to fetch him a cold drink from somewhere the other side of the covers. It’s all done with the bare minimum of apparent effort, he pulls his bat up shy when he drives, and stops halfway through his pull shot. But in substance he is the very model of a modern middle order cricketer. He had scored more centuries in T20 cricket than he had in Test matches, and still has a higher top score in the shorter format. Just.
