Cricket Gives You A Tight Hit: Sehwag Hits Gill After GT Shave | Cricket

Shubman Gill was 17 off nine balls in the powerplay as his opening partner Wriddhiman Saha was dismissed for a quick score of 30 off 19. Gill’s strike percentage of nearly 200 was the highest he achieved in an IPL 2023 match against Punjab Kings despite batting till the last over. Gujarat Titans’ chase over. After he was completely bowled in a desperate attempt to get over the line against Sam Curran in the second ball of the last over, GT needed another six runs to win. Had it not been for Rahul Tewatia’s spin in a short fine stretch, in the words of GT captain Hardik Pandya, it would have been a “bitter pill” for the defending champions to swallow.

This has been a problem with Gill’s batting in white-ball cricket, particularly in the T20 series. Despite all the dazzling moves he has to offer and the charming starts he more often than not ends up in, his bottom line is poor and worst of all, he tends to slow down a lot in the mid stages, which hurts the team’s progress. .

Former India opener Virender Sehwag pointed to Gill’s strike rate after the power play and said that he should not think about achieving personal milestones but start handling the game according to the situations.

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“He made 67 off 49 balls, but when did he reach his fifty? He reached his 50 maybe 41-42 balls, so in 7-8 balls he has scored 17 more runs. The acceleration came when he reached his fifty. If even that had happened, GT would have chased maybe 17 instead of 7 in the last over,” Sehwag said on Cricbuzz.

Sehwag is spot on. Even the numbers suggest it. Gill was 35 off 22 balls at one stage, but he took 18 more deliveries to reach 50 balls short of a run.

“You can’t think let me make a fifty and we’ll win the match anyway. This is cricket. As soon as you think about your own performance (instead of the team), you’re going to hit cricket hard. You can If he had shown the same will and played nearly 200 with a strike rate close to fifty, he could have reached the milestone much earlier and saved more deliveries for his team,” Sehwag added.

Gill also admitted that he should have finished the match by staying there until the end. “It slowed down with the old ball. So we had to get off to a good start in the powerplay. We lost a bit of momentum when Hardik bhai got out. It wasn’t a big score but it was important to rotate the strike. and you don’t have dot balls,” he said.

Disappointment with captain Hardik Pandya’s words in the post-match presentation was also evident. “To be very honest, I wouldn’t appreciate the game going that deep. We certainly had a lot to learn from this game… It would have been hard to swallow if the game had gone the other way. I’d like to end the game earlier, I’m not a big fan of taking it to the last end” , he said.