Will Jos Buttler's absence affect GT in IPL 2025 playoffs? Vikram Solanki opens up
'He's not available for the playoffs. So, we will approach the game as a team. It's not about one individual or three individuals, as you keep reminding me - they've had good seasons,' Solanki said in the post-match press conference.'I'm glad the top order has been scoring most of the runs. That's a good thing. Yes, it means the middle order has sometimes not had the opportunity to bat. But when they have played, I think they've actually given a good account of themselves.'In Buttler's absence, Gujarat have brought in Sri Lankan batter Kusal Mendis as a replacement.Solanki also heaped praise on Shahrukh Khan and Sherfane Rutherford for chipping in with handy knocks throughout the tournament. Shahrukh scored 57 runs against Lucknow Super Giants on May 22, although GT lost by 33 runs.advertisement'Shahrukh Khan played beautifully in the last game. Sherfane Rutherford has shown glimpses throughout the tournament, where he's been able to accelerate when we've needed him to.'So, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, isn't it? When your top order is scoring runs, the middle order doesn't get much opportunity. But when they do get a chance, you can't suddenly expect them to deliver match-winning innings every time,' Solanki added.Despite the defeat to CSK, the Titans are placed at the top of the table with 18 points and a net run rate of +0.254. But they are in danger of losing their top spot in the table with Mumbai Indians (MI), Punjab Kings (PBKS) and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) breathing down their necks.Stay updated on IPL 2025 with India Today! Get match schedules, team squads, live score, and the latest IPL points table for CSK, MI, RCB, KKR, SRH, LSG, DC, GT, PBKS, and RR. Plus, keep track of the top contenders for the IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap. Don't miss a moment!Tune In
IN THIS STORY#IPL 2025
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
41 minutes ago
- First Post
'Hello, you are playing for your country': Gavaskar compares workload debate to jawans at border, drops ODI captaincy hint
Sunil Gavaskar criticised workload management debate, indirectly targeting Jasprit Bumrah for missing two Tests. He also praised Shubman Gill's captaincy in India's 2-2 Test series draw against England and backed him as a future all-format captain. read more India's thrilling six-run win over England at The Oval on Monday, August 4 helped them level the five-match Test series 2-2. Not many believed India could make a comeback after losing the first Test badly at Headingley, but under Shubman Gill's captaincy, the team showed great fight and spirit. Former India captain Sunil Gavaskar was full of praise for Gill, calling him a strong candidate to lead India across all formats. Speaking after the match, Gavaskar said that the selectors might consider Gill as a future all-format captain, even though Rohit Sharma is currently the ODI skipper. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'Rohit and Kohli are available for ODIs. They haven't been selected as of yet. Those things will be up to the selection committee. When the ODI series against Australia or the West Indies gets underway, it will be the perfect time to go for the Gill if the selectors want,' Gavaskar said on Sony Sports. 'He is one of the most well-liked players in the team. He is getting those hundreds. If he is not happy with a hundred, he will go for the double hundred. He will then look to get a triple hundred if he is not happy with a double hundred. He got to 269 (at Edgbaston). He was showing that he can't give up. He just wanted to be there and make sure that every run mattered,' he added. Gavaskar slams Bumrah Meanwhile, Gavaskar also gave a strong opinion on the 'workload management' debate that has been a talking point for the past few months. He appeared to send a message to the Indian team management and took an indirect jibe at Jasprit Bumrah, who missed two Tests in the series citing workload concerns. Gavaskar compared the situation to the Indian Army soldiers who guard the country in extreme weather conditions. He even mentioned Rishabh Pant, who came out to bat with a fractured foot during the fourth Test in Manchester, praising his bravery, and lauded Mohammed Siraj for playing all games. 'If you're going to succumb to people talking about workload, then you'll never have your best players on the field. You've got to get them to a situation where you say, 'Hello, you are playing for your country, and when you're playing for your country, you have to forget the aches and pains in your muscles,' Gavaskar told India Today. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'Do you think the jawans complain about the cold or the conditions? They are out there, ready to give their lives for the country. You must give your very best for the nation. Don't worry about minor aches and pains. What did Rishabh Pant show you? He came out to bat with a fracture. That's the kind of spirit you want to see from your team,' he added. 'That's what is expected. Don't be held back by small injuries. It is an honour, given to you among 140 crore people, to represent India. You are incredibly lucky, and you should not take that lightly. And we've seen this attitude in Siraj—five Test matches, bowling non-stop,' he said. Bumrah and the Indian team management had already confirmed before the start of the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy series that the premier pacer would play only three matches. However, fans had hoped Bumrah might play one more match, considering the gaps between games, but he did not. Interestingly, India won both Tests that Bumrah missed - Edgbaston and The Oval. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
Indian Express
5 hours ago
- Indian Express
Shubman Gill's pursuit of perfection: How Indian captain put in serious hours to prepare for English Test and came out trumps
It was about a month before he was to take the most important flight of his life to Heathrow, London, for his first assignment as India's Test captain at 25. On one gloomy day in Chandigarh before Shubman Gill came to England, England came to Shubman Gill. It was IPL time, he was leading the Gujarat Titans and having nets on what seemed like a 'dicey' pitch – some balls flying towards his face, others darting at his ribs. Shubman would stop training, dump the white balls back in the kit bag, and ask for a shiny red new one, the kind used for Test matches. Even while playing IPL, Shubman wasn't missing a chance to be England-ready. Gujarat Titans' assistant coach Naeem Amin is based out of London, and he was there to witness Shubman's quick ball-switch. 'And the bit that you will find interesting was him keen to practice just against a new ball. As soon as the new ball would become a little bit old, he'd change it for another new ball,' says Amin. As India's new Test No.4, Shubman knew that after facing the white-ball on flat tracks, he had to deal with the swinging-seaming red cherry in England. Amin also talks about the young skipper's hunger to learn and the desire to improve. 'His appetite always puts cricket first, and in that aspect, he is second to none. When Kane Williamson (former New Zealand captain and world's leading modern-day batsman) was in our team (GT), he was asking him about his thoughts all the time. 'How would you go about this or that? Why are you doing this drill? How does it benefit you?'.' England and New Zealand are miles apart, but on the cricketing map of conditions and pitches, they aren't that different. Williamson is in England playing county cricket these days, and turned up for the Lord's Test to find his one-time IPL teammate in the middle of the form of his life. He was pretty happy with what he saw. The pursuit of batting perfection has been Shubman's life goal since his wonder years in Punjab's border town of Fazilka. His father, a landed farmer, would pay kids in the neighbourhood Rs 100 to bowl at his son all day. When in his teens, Shubman knew that he could go back to tractors, fields and the family agriculture income, if cricket didn't work out. Like many others around him, the batting prodigy didn't lose sleep over the dilemma of academics or a career option. He would get up fresh with only cricket on his mind. Shubman would follow a punishing schedule, all through his Under-16 and Under-19 days, bat close to 6 to 8 hours every day. A typical day for him in Chandigarh, where he and his father moved from their village, would be about 3 to 4 hours of batting in the morning, a quick Amritsari lunch of patti or chhola kulcha, and again 3 to 4 hours of batting. Even when he made it to the Indian team, he was among the batsmen who batted the most at the nets. 'I want my body to take control of my mind … Not my mind taking control of me, seeding inside me self-doubts or getting carried away. Because I have practised so much for so many years, I want my body to take control of my mind. Let the muscle memory kick in. That's my challenge: use the mind to tell itself to stay quiet,' he once told The Indian Express. In England at the age 25, Shubman seemed to have achieved that batting nirvana. India's batting coach Sitanshu Kotak has been watching him closely for the past several months, and he could notice a change. 'From the Australia series to this series, I have seen his thought process and the way he batted. It is little different from what he has done in Australia … I would give a lot of credit to him for deciding what he wants to play, when he does not … Every batter, at some stage of their life, thinks and changes the way they bat in Test cricket. And Shubman seemed to be doing that brilliantly in this England series,' Kotak said. Before this series, Shubman's highest Test score was his 128 against Australia in 2023. As if he was given a Midas touch along with the captain's armband, everything that he touched in England has turned to gold. Between June 20 to July 6 – his fortnight of fortitude from the first to the third Test – Shubman registered three higher scores: 147, 269, 161. This was like the Swedish pole-vaulter Mondo Duplantis clearing new heights every other day, raising the bar at will. It was in Birmingham that Shubman would find his Bodhi Tree, where he found enlightenment. In England, his 267 is being hailed as the most perfect knock he's ever played. Data shows that epic innings had a false shot percentage of 3.5 – that's the least for any innings in England since this statistic came into existence 20 years back. Since geniuses like Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Pointing, Rahul Dravid, Virat Kohli are on the list below Shubman, the Birmingham innings is worthy to be framed in India's batting Hall of Fame. The near-perfect 267 was the outcome of his long penance, after mulling over many dismissals. It lifted him to a higher level, elevated him to the spiritual state where 'the body controls the mind' and the 'mind tells itself to stay quiet.' xxx England isn't an easy place to play cricket. In summer, the days are long; for cricketers, they are longer. They can suck the energy out of you, the weather can be murky, it can make you gloomy. This time, during the day, there was heat too. Consider the schedule of an Indian cricketer during the Lord's Test to understand this. The day would start at 6 am to be on the team bus that would start at 8 am. The match timing would be 11 am to 6.30 pm. By the time the team settles on the bus for the journey back to the team hotel, after press conferences and interviews, it would be 7.30 p.m. From Lord's to St James Court, where the team stayed, was easily a one and half hour long journey on the team bus, negotiating London's notorious traffic. After that the players would have a meal, some me-time and then hit the bed. Within hours, the alarm would go off once again. The schedule would be more or less the same for 25 days, plus there was the pressure of performance and fear of failure to deal with. For Gautam Gambhir, Shubman's biggest achievement as a first-time skipper was to remain unfazed all through this very demanding tour. 'This England team challenges a captain much more than Australia. They have many batsmen who can just run away with the game, and this puts pressure on the captain when the team is fielding. But not once has he looked shattered or lost,' he says. In Australia, there's just one Travis Head in the Test team who can mentally disintegrate an opposition captain and make the fielding side rudderless. In England, Bazballers are crawling out of the dressing room ever so frequently. It starts with openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett, the batting buccaneers who can brain freeze the best. Down the batting line-up, there is Harry Brook, Jamie Smith, and Ben Stokes – all three with swinging bats that can rattle any captain. The run machine Joe Root, with his solidity, seems to loom as a fulcrum. There have been occasions when Shubman has looked clueless, when he seemed to have lost the grip on the game but the team didn't give up. As was the case at The Oval when Brook and Root seemed to have the game in their pocket, India kept on coming back at them. And when they got a toe-hold in the door, they barged in as a commando unit on a covert operation. But as a member of the tour said, this series has been one of learning for the young skipper. 'See the way Ben Stokes leads his team, he has a few fielding templates, or call them plans, to get wickets. He keeps his fielders moving around. Suddenly, there would be a leg-side trap, next the off-side would have fielders in funky positions. Shubman needs to find his own templates and plan. He is young, he is hungry, he will learn,' a team official says. Gujarat Titans coach Amin gives an example of Shubman's thinking of a course correction as soon as he gets out. 'He is not the kind you will say I could have done this or that. After he has made a mistake as a batsman and got out, he has already dissected it on his walk back to the dugout. This is how quickly he realizes what he needs to do. There are times when there might be video analysis going on for another batter. He's keen to listen in, just in case he can upskill 0.5%,' he says. In the first Test in Leeds, he got out playing a reckless shot when on 147. It would have helped if he had stayed on longer. On the eve of the next Test, he would take the blame, promise to do better and an astonishing atonement waited for him. He would score a double hundred in the next innings. What was that compelling reason for the improved performance? '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,' the team official said. This was a captain subtly asserting himself; this was a skipper earning the right to be the 'commander.' Former England captain Nasser Hussain, who had noted during the first Test that Gill 'lacked aura' would reassess his verdict at the end of the second Test: 'He (Gill) is not going to be a Kohli-type character. He's got a low heartbeat, but that can help. Look at this crowd here today. Look at all of India watching on. You may need someone just to calm the team.' As for Gambhir, he hasn't been over-interfering in the proceedings on the field. For long periods of stand-offs where wickets have been hard to come by, the captain has been changing fields, bowlers, and tactics without any obvious prompt from the dressing room. When Shubman is batting, the substitutes haven't randomly run on the field with gloves, or when the team is fielding, carrying unasked-for water bottles. Shubman does his thing, the way he likes. He does have counsel available on the field. Vice-captain Pant, seniors KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, Jasprit Bumrah, and even Mohammed Siraj, to chip in – when asked for and even offer unsolicited advice. As the pundits from the commentators box, especially while assessing the new captain during the first Test have said 'Shubman is running the team by committee.' xxx Amin speaks about this same leadership trait in the captain, who is always willing to listen. 'Shubman is the kind of guy where a 15-year-old was there and he had an opinion on something and Shubman thought it would be useful to him, he would listen to him,' he says. Behind those soft features and dimpled smile, there is a steely resolve to stay ahead. 'The guy puts in hours… he puts in some serious hours to get better. Like I'm telling you about the red ball, how he's practising against it, even when he's in India. He's just trying to stay one step ahead,' says Amin. It is the same pursuit of perfection that started from the border town. Life came full circle for Shubman at The Oval. In a 2-2 verdict, it was tough to say if the runs brought the best out of his captaincy or the captaincy triggered an avalanche of runs.
Time of India
10 hours ago
- Time of India
Amazing to see how well Washington Sundar played in England: Rhodes
CHENNAI: Following the retirements of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli from the Test arena, Indian cricket has entered a new phase. Rohit and Kohli's contributions had long been central to the team's success in the longest format. But, in their absence, a young crop made its mark and showed promise in the India-England series. India's not-so-experienced batting line-up in English conditions rose to the challenge, with Shubman Gill leading from the front in his first series as captain. South African great Jonty Rhodes believes that India's incredible depth has both positive and negative impact. Bowled Over by Miya Magic: Mohammed Siraj shines brightest | IND vs ENG 5th Test 'I think India's biggest disadvantage is the fact that they have got so many players. It is not just the IPL, every state has its own league and it is a great platform for young players to showcase their skill. In India, it is so difficult to know when to retire. When you see young prodigious talent churned out and if you do not give them a chance, you possibly could not lose them but the frustrations will grow. It is kind of a double-edged sword. It is great to see the young players stepping up,' Jonty said, after the opening ceremony of the Asian Surfing Championships in Mamallapuram. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like No annual fees for life UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo One such player who made a strong impact was Washington Sundar . The 25-year-old all-rounder played a vital role with both bat and ball. 'Washington has played a lot of limited-overs cricket and it is amazing to see how he played in England. We have seen the importance of all-rounders and there are exciting times ahead,' Jonty, who is the brand ambassador of the Surfing Federation of India, added. There has been quite a bit of talk about the competitiveness in Test cricket, with matches often ending in less than five days. However, the fight in the India-England series came as a pleasant surprise, as the first four Tests went till the fifth day. 'When T20 started, everyone thought that Test cricket would be at risk. But I think we have seen the level of skill now added with this bravery and everyone talks about 'Bazball'. Rishabh Pant is getting himself into all sorts of interesting positions when he is playing and that just makes it exciting. 'If a five-match series comes down to Day 4 in the fifth Test, that is what you want to see. Every single Test in the series had its ups and downs, which kept people engaged throughout.' WTC win an incredible feat for SA After multiple heartbreaks in the knockout stages of ICC events, South Africa finally seized their moment by clinching the World Test Championship title. 'It was interesting because we did not win trophies for a long time. There was criticism from coaches and commentators, mainly the commentators asking who have South Africa played. It is fine because sadly, we do not play a lot of Test cricket. Test cricket is big business and if it is not against Australia or India or England, it is a draining business. 'It has been disappointing how little Test cricket the South Africans get to play. I think it is an incredible feat (WTC win), considering the limited time they spend in the format. Hopefully, now that they have won an ICC trophy, the shackles will be released.' For real-time updates, scores, and highlights, follow our live coverage of the India vs England Test match here. Catch Rani Rampal's inspiring story on Game On, Episode 4. Watch Here!
