Shubman Gill was dismissed by a delivery from Kyle Jamieson that nipped back in. (PHOTO: Screengrab/X)
The conversation around Indian skipper Shubman Gill’s technique has intensified after former Indian cricketer Ravichandran Ashwin provided an in-depth analysis of the flaws in Gill’s technique. This came after former Indian captain Sunil Gavaskar criticised the current Indian captain’s approach to playing the inswinging delivery.
Playing on 23 runs off 18 balls in the third ODI against New Zealand in Indore, Gill was clean bowled by a delivery from Kyle Jamieson that nipped back in sharply and went past his forward defence. The ball was pitched in the outside-off channel and, with Gill pressing forward in defence, it went past the inside edge, clipped the top of his pads, and crashed into the off-stump.
Taking to X, Ashwin went into full professor mode to provide a deep technical breakdown of Gill’s batting.
He wrote, “Sunny bhai is talking about how Shubman’s bat was really close to the pad in England where he made all his runs. I am going to try and illustrate the challenge for a modern-day batter, the changes which happen automatically most of the time when you shift in & out of red-ball cricket.”
Sunny bhai is talking about how Shubman’s bat was really close to the pad in England where he made all his runs.
I am going to try and illustrate the challenge for a modern day batter, the changes which happen automatically most of the times when you shift in & out of red ball… pic.twitter.com/2VovLVJimT
— Ashwin 🇮🇳 (@ashwinravi99) January 18, 2026
The following are the four different pictures and Ashwin’s word-to-word analysis.
Pic 1: His natural receiving position where the bat comes from gully; he is naturally picking up the bat to hit the delivery as he has been trained to do this over years of practice.
Pic 2: He has seen the line of the delivery and re-aligned his bat to meet the ball head-on and is in a superb position thus far.
The bat needs to now start curving in to meet the ball such that he doesn’t leave a gap between bat and pad.
Pic 3: The gap has started to emerge here and he knows he is in trouble because the ball has pitched and started to duck back in.
He should be able to release his bottom hand a touch and manoeuvre his hands closer to the pads and handle this delivery.
Pic 4: If you see closely, the bottom hand, which is supposed to be used for dexterity, hasn’t loosened up and allowed the last-minute adjustment.
Even though he wants to shut the gap down, his bottom hand, which is firm on the handle, isn’t allowing him to do it.
He further added, “This is what happened now, but he managed to address this while he was playing tests in England. Gill is a fab player, this is not a huge mistake, this can happen due to lack of awareness most of the times because his natural habitat is the dominant usage of his bottom hand.( especially while playing the white ball. ”
Earlier, Gavaskar criticised Gill’s batting technique against in-swinging deliveries and said: “When Shubman Gill got those 754 runs in England, the bat and pad were so close to each other. I kept saying the bat and pad were like a just married couple. They were that close to each other and his defense looked impregnable. The straight driving was as crisp as when Sachin Tendulkar was at his best, and as good as Virat Kohli’s straight driving. 754 runs, observing proper batting technique, he said during the commentary.
He further called the advice to change his backlift while playing in white-ball cricket as ‘nonsense’. “We can have a look at the gap between bat and ball. It is a big gap and (bat) coming from an angle, that’s what I think the talk was, that if you want to succeed in the white ball game, you’ve got to bring your bat from about third man or gully. Nonsense,” he said.
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