What does the Gambhir-Gill era hold for India after 2-2 draw in England?

A month and a half ago, before India took the field against England at Headingley, Leeds, for the first Test, a drawn series at 2-2 might have been thought of as a great result. This was a team in transition, Shubman Gill was captaining for the first time, and Gautam Gambhir’s tenure as coach had been particularly rocky in Test cricket.

Five Test matches and 25 days of cricket later, the drawn series remains a good result for India for those same reasons. Yet, it might also be seen as a missed opportunity. But for some key moments that England seized, India might well have been on the right side of a 3-1 result. Conversely, the way India fought back to draw the fourth Test, and then pull off a win for the ages in the fifth, it could also feel like India could have been on the wrong end of a 1-3 result, but came from behind to draw it.

Given that, a 2-2 draw seems like the fairest cricketing outcome. What the long series did was give a glimpse into what the Gambhir-Gill era in Test cricket might look like for India.

The pragmatic Gambhir

In T20 cricket, Gambhir has shown over the years that he prefers multi-skilled players, especially for those last one or two spots in the XI. It is a sound strategy for the shortest format, especially when it comes to picking bowlers. The marginal difference that a slightly better bowler makes is not enough to offset the gains that deeper batting provides. Conventionally, the opposite would seem to be true for Test cricket. The ability to take wickets - and therefore bowling quality - should be paramount.

However, Gambhir has shown in the team selections during India’s tour of Australia as well as this England series, that he prefers batting depth in his Test match XIs too. He can justifiably point to the end result of a drawn series to justify his methods.

The only question: is it sustainable? In almost each of the five Tests, the bowlers were picked as they offered something with the bat and were not shouldering the workload of a full-time bowler.

In the fifth Test at the Oval, Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar combined bowled only 10 overs across two innings. Meanwhile, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep and Prasidh Krishna bowled 126.3 overs between them. It is a testament to their fitness and resilience that their last spells were as intense as their first ones, but India needs to consider whether these workloads are viable in the long term.

Whether picking more attacking bowling instead of depth in batting would have altered the series result is anybody’s guess. While it may have restricted England’s totals, it would have also meant India scored fewer runs. The end result was a net positive for India - a drawn series away from home, so Gambhir can justifiably say his team structure worked.

“There are some things that me, and we as a team, definitely need to work on. I kind of have more clarity on the areas we need to work on as a team, and personally, I need to work on as a captain,” he reflected after the series. “Whenever your decision goes well, people praise you. I’m aware that there are going to be shots taken at me if it doesn’t go well. I’m fine with that because at the end of the day, I know that I made the decision that was best for the team.”

Gill has always been more calm than excitable, and his words hinted at the steel he has too.

During the series, he showed he could be his own man without losing the collaborative aspect that every captain needs to have with his bowlers. So Gill sometimes overrode bowlers’ wishes in setting fields, but was also quick to change if it wasn't working.

He acknowledged freely that if you had six bowlers, at least one was bound to be under-bowled. He also showed both fire and ice, getting into a heated discussion with England’s players in the third Test, but preserving a zen calm in the fifth.

Gill and Gambhir’s next challenge is to regain India’s supremacy at home, which was badly dented by the 3-0 whitewash against New Zealand. If this series is anything to go by, they should be confident about achieving that and proving that the New Zealand loss was an aberration.