India are aiming to draw the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy.
A few weeks before the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, the discussion surrounding the Indian team, under the leadership of Shubman Gill, was whether they would come close to challenging the England team on their home turf. The chief reason being two stalwarts – Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli – announcing their retirement from Test cricket.
Kohli, who is India’s most successful Test captain, called time on his 13-year career in the longest form after playing 123 matches and scoring 9,230 runs. Rohit, who was the captain of the side before he retired, played 67 Tests and scored 4,301 runs in a Test career that spanned 11 years.
Succeeding Rohit was his ODI deputy, Shubman Gill, who was coming off a miserable run in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia. Gill, being just 31 Tests old, also had a point to prove in the England tour.
But as soon as the series started, it was evident that the Indian team was nowhere close to being pushovers. They lost the first Test at Headingley and the third Test at Lord’s, but they were in the game for both matches and pushed England to their limits.
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Former England batter Graham Gooch felt that India are in safe hands with Gill at the helm, as he felt that the retirement of Kohli and Rohit had to happen at some point in time.
“Look, one door closes, another one opens. You can’t expect, great players or any players to play on forever. There is a time when they decide that they’ve had enough or come to retirement or whatever,” Gooch told PTI on Sunday.
The batsmen stepped up on every occasion, scoring a total of 12 hundreds, the most by a visiting team in England. Four of those have come from skipper Gill himself as he blazed his way to 754 runs, breaking a long-standing record of most runs scored by an Indian skipper in a single Test series.
“I think the young Indian players have done brilliantly. The captain [Shubman Gill] has been outstanding. He looks a real class act with the willow and hopefully he’ll get many, many more Test runs and get many victories for India in the future. So I think the team’s in good hands,” the batting great further added.
India have fared well without Kohli and Rohit with Gill piling on runs at No.4, a position previously occupied by Kohli. The opening pair, Yashasvi Jaiswal and KL Rahul, have scored four hundreds in total, showing that the team can do without Rohit at the top of the order.
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