Follow UsThe baton of the star batter in Test cricket has switched hands over the years. While the first genuine batting superstar of the country was Sunil Gavaskar, or the Little Master he is fondly called, surpassing the 10,000-run landmark in the red-ball format, he passed on the baton to Sachin Tendulkar, who debuted nearly two and half years later than the former’s Test retirement.
From Tendulkar, who furthered the batting prowess by becoming the first, and till now, only batter to amass more than 15000 Test runs, the baton passed to Virat Kohli, a modern-day great.
Kohli debuted in June 2011, nearly two and a half years ahead of Tendulkar’s retirement in the format. Now, Nasser Hussain, a former England captain and Test stalwart, predicted that Shubman Gill will be the one who will carry the baton forward from Kohli.
While Kohli made only 9230 runs, he was the true successor of Sachin in terms of skills and panache. Gill, who debuted in 2020, nearly four and a half years ahead of Kohli’s Test retirement, already has 32 Tests under his belt and nearly 200 runs. Although he has not been able to claim early success in the longest format, he is now the captain of the Test side and looking to improve with every outing.
“Test match cricket is so much better when Kohli is playing. We will move on - we moved on from Gavaskar to Tendulkar to Kohli and maybe now to Gill. But Kohli added so much to this game of cricket,” Hussain said in a pre-match discussion of the first Test between England and India at Headingley on June 20 (Friday).
“He was in the huddle pointing at every Indian player, telling them to unleash hell on that England batting lineup. And they did. That side became a mirror image of Kohli - the feistiness of Siraj, Bumrah, Shami... in-your-face cricket,” added the 57-year-old in Sky Sports’ pre-match show.