Shubman Gill is a kind individual. He treats the ball with respect, he is kind to those around him, and he speaks softly, even while he is scoring runs fast and easily. He never breaks the cover of the ball, not even when he steps up, pulls in front of mid-wicket, or delivers a square-on off-side punch with short-arm stabs, or when he dances down the track and drops it over the boundary of the straight field.

As a result, it was a little unexpected to hear the guttural scream that came out of his mouth when he reached three-figures at Edgbaston on Wednesday. Gill has now scored seven Test centuries; this was not his first. After all, he had already scored his highest Test score of 147 in his debut as captain, which was not even his first hundred of the series. What, then, triggered that violent shout that could have been heard as clearly in Bengaluru as it was in Birmingham?

You pondered, was it relief? Was it merely an outlet for pent-up feelings? Or was it a response to the events of the previous several days, which came to a head with the rest of Jasprit Bumrah and the ongoing exclusion of Kuldeep Yadav?

What is your response to the continuous critique of what is seen as a defensive maneuver by a club that is behind 0-1 but unwilling to employ the tools that are best suited to capturing wickets? A century isn't too bad, is it?

With a surface that may be more responsive waiting for him at Lord's the following week, there may have been a case for giving Bumrah a break. As Chris Woakes noted, the Edgbaston course didn't have a lot of pace, lift, or help for the faster bowlers after the cloud cover dissipated and the sun broke through. The England quick, who got rid of KL Rahul and Nitish Kumar Reddy, described the pitch as 'a very good wicket for batting.' He anticipated that the spinners would receive assistance later in the game, perhaps on day four or five. Although there was a clamor for Bumrah to be included, you could see the logic behind his absence, especially since it was widely known that he would be absent from two of the five Tests.

What about Kuldeep, though? What reason did he have for continuing to sit on the bench? India's strategy of hedging their bets by adding seam-bowling all-rounder Nitish and spinning all-rounder Washington Sundar, both of whom excel at batting, to their lineup helped strengthen their batting. On the last day, when England needed 350 runs to win, India only managed five wickets, making it impossible to assure victory even with 835 runs at Headingley. On the eve of the match, Gill himself admitted that a second spinner would have been helpful on day five in Leeds. On a pitch that was very similar to the one on which the first Test was played, it would have been more prudent to have the option of relying on Kuldeep's evident skills.

Washington has emerged as a spinner, as shown by his 11-wicket explosion in a losing battle against New Zealand in Pune in October. However, Kuldeep is a unique talent, a wizard whose left-arm wrist-spin is far from typical in Test cricket and may be particularly difficult for the lower order to understand. In Leeds, it was the lower-order runs in the first innings that cost India, but Kuldeep isn't just 'The Mop' like the English fast bowler Josh Tongue. He is equally adept at spinning out the specialist batters. India have undoubtedly missed the trick for the second match in a row.

a superior knock under pressure

But maybe we're going too far. Perhaps Gill was methodically dismantling England with common sense and an instinctive grasp of the game's context, rather than with a beautiful series of strokes, without any of these ideas passing through his head. When the ball was thrown in experimental regions, which happened frequently, he defended with a small but confident manner. Furthermore, he would either move his left foot forward to drive imperiously or his right foot back to pull and cut with authority as soon as he was sure that he could reach its pitch on length or account for deviation.

He swept Joe Root fine and then a little squarer for successive boundaries with the second new ball two deliveries away, the second making him only the fourth Indian after Virat Kohli, Vijay Hazare, and Sunil Gavaskar to score centuries in his first two tests as captain. In his last three games against England, beginning with Dharamsala in March of last year, Gill has accumulated three tons. His struggles outside the subcontinent are no longer a concern; rather, his captaincy has awakened the prolific run-scoring monster within him. Perhaps his joy was sparked by that. On the other hand, perhaps it wasn't, you know.

Read Also: Tendulkar’s Warm Tribute to Jaiswal and Gill; Yuvraj Catches Smith’s Eye as India Captain Reaches Rare Landmark
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