“. I just cannot come up with a logical reasoning…”Sanjay Manjrekar drops a massive bombshell on Gill’s weakness in Test cricket

Shubman Gill presents a rather peculiar statistic. Gill has the highest second innings average of any Indian Test batsman since 2020. Worryingly, though, his overall Test batting average stands at a lowly 35, implying that he struggles to score significantly in the first innings. This was once again the case, when India and Bangladesh faced each other in their first Test, as Gill as able to recover from a first innings duck to score a fine 119 in the second. This is something that bewildered former cricketer and commentator Sanjay Manjrekar.

“I do not know. I just cannot come up with a logical reasoning from the game,” Manjrekar stated on ESPNCricinfo, on the matter of Gill’s inexplicable poor run in the first innings.

“His Test career veered off track a bit. He began really well, against Australia in Australia – got a 90. After that, he got a few chances even against relatively weak teams in India, and didn’t really make the big runs, and then there were the impossible series. South Africa is always hard and then he returned to India and there was that Hyderabad Test where he failed,” Manjrekar went on to explain.

At the end of the third day, Bangladesh was 158/4 with captain Najmul Hossain Shanto scoring 51 not out and Shakib Al Hasan chipping in with 5 runs. Post-Tea, Bangladesh began at 56/0 with unbeaten batters Shadman Islam (21) and Zakir Hasan (32).

Jasprit Bumrah got the Indians off to a good start in the session by getting rid of Zakir for 33 (47 balls) who managed to resist. The remaining three were taken by Ravichandran Ashwin who took out Shadman Islam (35), Mominul Haque (13), and Mushfiqur Rahim (13).

On the third day of the Chennai Test, shortly after the tea break, India was on 205/3 with Rishabh Pant (82) and Shubman Gill (86) batting at that juncture. India now leads by 432 runs.

As it happened, Pant scored a hundred in this innings after returning to play the longest format of the game after injury. On the contrary, Gill scored an unbeaten 119 off 176 balls which included 10 fours and four sixes.

Middle-order batter KL Rahul also scored an impactful knock of 22 not out in 19 balls which contained four fours.

India returned for the second innings with 287/4 declared in their favour. They provided the first match of the series with a 515 runs target for the visitors in order to seize the match.