“He scored 67 off 49 balls but when did he reach his fiifty?”, Virender Sehwag asks Shubman Gill to focus on game situations and not personal milestones

At the end of the powerplay, with Shubman Gill on 17 and Wriddhiman Saha out for 30, Gill had scored 17 runs off 9 balls. Although Gill batted till the last over of Gujarat Titans’ chase in their IPL 2023 encounter against the Punjab Kings, his strike rate of over 200 was the highest it would get. In the second delivery of the last over, with GT needing 6 runs to win, he was clean-bowled while attempting a desperate heave over the line against Sam Curran. Hardik Pandya, captain of the GT, described the victory as a “bitter pill” to stomach if not for Rahul Tewatia‘s lap over short fine leg.

In white-ball cricket, particularly T20s, this has been Gill’s biggest concern. He has some beautiful strokes and usually gets off to a good start, but his finishing rate is terrible, and he slows down considerably in the middle overs, which impedes the team’s progress.

Virender Sehwag, a former India opener, criticized Gill for focusing on personal milestones and suggested that he start handling the game situationally instead.

Virender Sehwag asks Shubman Gill to focus on game situations and not personal milestones

Sehwag is right. The statistics support this conclusion. At one point, Gill had scored 35 off of 22 balls, but he needed 18 more balls to get his fifty, at an average of less than a run per ball. Gill, too, thought he should have stayed for the whole encounter and finished the game.

“He scored 67 off 49 balls but when did he reach his fiifty? He reached his fifty off maybe 41-42 balls so in 7-8 balls he has scored 17 more runs. The acceleration came there after he had reached his fifty. If even that had not happened then GT would have chased maybe 17 instead of 7 in the last over,” Sehwag said on Cricbuzz.

“You can’t think let me score a fifty and we will anyway win the match. This is cricket. The moment you think about your own performance (instead of the team), you will get a tight slap from cricket. You can’t think like that. If he had shown the same intent and played at close to a strike rate of 200 when he was nearing fifty then he could have reached his milestone a lot earlier and save more deliveries for his team,” Sehwag added.

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