'The game loses its essence without help for bowlers' - Gill on flat conditions

Shubman Gill marked his first Test win as captain at Edgbaston with a staggering aggregate of 430 runs in the match but admitted that the game loses its essence without some semblance of a contest between bat and ball. The conditions in Birmingham were stacked heavily in favour of the batters, with the bowlers left to make the most of a tiny window of about 30 overs when the Dukes ball stayed hard and offered some bite off the surface.

"It gets very difficult for the bowlers," the Indian captain said on Sunday (July 6) after the visitors drew level in the series with victory by 336 runs. "Even more than the pitch, the ball is going soft and out of shape very quickly. I don't know what it is - weather, pitches or whatever - but it gets very difficult for the bowlers to get wickets in these conditions. As a team, when you know it is difficult to get wickets and runs are coming easily, a lot of things are out of your control.

"I think there should be a little help at least. If the ball is doing something, you enjoy playing. If you know there is only 20 overs of any help and then you have to spend the rest of the day on the defensive, thinking how to stop runs, then the game loses its essence."

India, through Akash Deep and Mohammed Siraj, were able to outbowl their English fast-bowling counterparts in this narrow window, taking 15 of the 20 wickets in the three bursts with the new ball. Both teams had to resort to defensive bowling - with wide lines and 6-3 fields - or throw the dice with a short-ball ploy with catchers on the leg-side.

Heaping praise on bowlers that did play, Gill said the efforts of his lead seamers, Akash Deep and Mohammed Siraj, had been outstanding. He even lauded Prasidh Krishna for setting the tone with an excellent first spell on the final day albeit earning no rewards. "Both of them took 16-17 wickets. That itself is a big, big achievement coming into this Test match, especially without Jasprit [Bumrah] bhai. There were a lot of questions if we would be able to take those 20 wickets. And the way these two guys delivered was just outstanding. I have no words to describe."

This skewed bat-ball balance in England - partly a function of the style of play the home team favours - is a significant departure from what Gill has experienced anywhere else in his still-young Test career. The spicy, result-oriented pitches around the world had condemned his average to 35.05 at the start of the series, but two games in, that number has already shot up by more than seven points. Gill, though, joked that England are unlikely to roll out a pitch as flat as this again in the series.

Even so, the 25-year-old had taken it upon himself to bat the opposition out of the game following India's lower-order collapses in Leeds cost them a game they'd also dominated. Gill, who made 147 in Leeds before holing out in the deep while trying to slog Shoaib Bashir, followed through on that by making 269 and 161 in the two innings here at Edgbaston.

"Sometimes, especially when you are the captain, I think you need to lead by example so that whenever there is another player in that situation, you can command that player," Gill said. "'This is what the team requires right now and you always have to put the team first rather than your personal desires.

"Or sometimes you want to try some things, but I think if you put the team ahead of you, you will always walk in the right direction or walk on the right path and that's what I wanted to do in this match. If a good ball gets me out, it gets me out, but as long as I'm there, I want to play as long as possible."

Meanwhile, Gill was pleased by the somewhat lopsided situation in the Test series where each of the two Tests has gone to the fifth day but India have, by the quirk of the opponent's playing style and toss patterns, ended up batting on eight of those days.

"Definitely helped us in a massive way," Gill said. "I would say not many Test matches when we play in India go for five days. But luckily most of the days when we are playing here we are batting and not fielding, so that's good for us. Even in the first innings, I think we fielded for about 90 overs, which is about a day. So I think that's good. I think even in the series, in the upcoming matches, if you're able to score runs consistently and post around 400 or 300 totals, we will always be in the game."

That said, the passive nature of the pitches and India's batting boosts through the first two Tests have prompted discussion over whether they might be better served playing a wrist spinner to wrench some jeopardy through that middle phase. While Gill said that prospect was very tempting, the finger spinner was able to give more control, with the likes of Washington Sundar and Ravindra Jadeja also adding to batting depth.

"It's very tempting when you have a bowler like Kuldeep. One of the reasons why I wanted to play Washington was because it gives us batting depth. And in the first innings, I think the partnership between me and Washington was very important," Gill said in reference to the century stand for the seventh wicket. "If that partnership wasn't there, I think our lead would have been 70-80-90 runs, which is psychologically very different from 180. If it was 80 runs, you would think the team behind is still close.

"And as much as we expected, even on the fifth day, the ball wasn't turning from the straight, and only moving from the rough. We thought that on a fifth day wicket, the finger spinner will give us more control."