NEW DELHI: Indian Test skipper and all-format star Shubman Gill revealed the moment which made him realise that he was meant to play cricket at the age of 11. Shubman was speaking in an interview on Apple Music’s official YouTube channel.
Speaking during the video, Gill revealed that as an 11-year-old, he attended a camp of under-23 fast bowlers and scored ninety-odd runs while playing against bowlers way older than him.
“Honestly, I realised this is going to be my career when I was 11. Like, a moment happened. There was a camp going on of under-23 Indian fast bowlers, and I was only 11. So they were more than double my age, most of the players there, and they were a batsman short. One of my really good friends, one of my closest friends who I practised with, Khushpreet, was in that camp. He was a fast bowler, and he asked the head coach if he could get me because we were a batsman short and we were playing a match”, Gill recalled.
“And then I was batting way down the order, like at number seven or eight. Our first four or five batsmen got out within four or five overs, and then I went in to bat and scored 90-something not out. That moment and that innings, like, it was just a practice match, nothing, but the confidence that moment gave me is what made me realise, okay, this is… this is like, I am meant to do this,” he added.
The Indian batting superstar also revealed that when he was three years old, he used to imitate the cricketers that his father used to watch on TV with him. Noticing his talent, his father started to coach him and had people who came to his farm for work throw balls at home.
“I then used to sit and watch, okay, what is the batsman doing, how is he hitting, and I used to try to imitate that. When he used to come back and see, oh, if I’m doing it in the right way. I was about three years old, and he was quite shocked. It is quite rare that a three-year-old can imitate seeing something on the screen that well. And that is how it started. He is also my coach, so that’s how he started coaching me. That’s how we… so people used to work on our farm, they used to come and throw balls at me, and I used to bat,” he said.
Gill said that when he was seven years of age, he shifted to Chandigarh from Fazilka, and he was enrolled in a cricket academy, which truly kick-started his cricketing journey.
“When I turned about 7, that’s when we came from there to Chandigarh, where I am right now, because back in the village, obviously, there were not many facilities, not many opportunities there. Chandigarh was the capital of Punjab, a very booming city, and that is where we came. He enrolled me on an academy, and that’s how my actual cricketing journey started,” he concluded.
Indeed, Gill has come really far since his days of batting in his father’s farm and has evolved into a promising all-format talent. At 26 years of age in 114 international matches, Gill has scored 6,020 runs in 146 innings at an average of 46.30 and a strike rate of 80.05, with 18 centuries and 25 fifties.
With an Indian Premier League (IPL) title, Orange Cap, ICC Champions Trophy 2025 and a well-fought 2-2 draw against England, in England, in his first series as a captain, the batter looks destined to achieve bigger things in future as the newest poster boy of Indian cricket. (ANI)
