Alastair Cook Defends Shubman Gill After Ex-England Star Asks Tough Questions: "Ben Stokes..."
Former England cricketers David Lloyd and Alastair Cook had contrasting takes on Shubman Gill 's captaincy, which has become a huge topic point after India's loss in the Leeds Test earlier this week. Despite dominating majority of the action on the first four days, India gift-wrapped the game to England on Day 5 courtesy of some poor bowling and fielding errors. Lloyd raised questions over Gill's approach, labelling it 'reactive rather than proactive'. However, former England captain Cook was rather sympathetic towards Gill, and compared his situation to Ben Stokes ' early days as captain of England's Test team.
"The intrigue is with Shubman Gill, who's a very inexperienced skipper. How's he going to come back from that? He's got Ravindra Jadeja and Karun Nair, who are in their 30s. So he's got experience in his team. It's great having a young team that he's got. But tactically he's reactive rather than proactive in the stuff that he's doing," Lloyd said on Sky Sports' Stick to Cricket podcast.
Cook responded by saying that it takes time for a team to gel under a new captain.
"When you take over a team, there will always be a phase when the team gets used to the new leader. This happened with (Ben) Stokes when he came in. It took a while (for England players) to get used to him when he came in and said, 'We're going to try and smash every ball'," replied Cook.
Despite vice-captain Rishabh Pant scoring centuries in each innings of the opening Tests and other key batters in openers KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Gill himself hitting their respective tons, India failed to get to bigger totals in both the innings and also dropped crucial catches. This is the first time in history of Indian cricket that a team lost a Test after five individual hundreds being scored by its batters.
India collapsed from 430/3 in the first innings to 471 losing seven wickets for 41 runs and in the second, they crumbled to 364 all-out from 333 for 4, losing six wickets for 31 runs.
On Day 5, India failed to defend a fourth-innings target of 371 under overcast conditions, with England comfortably chasing it down with five wickets to spare
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