Asia Cup 2025: Shubman Gill’s elevation a natural progression in India's scheme of things

The selection of Shubman Gill as vice-captain of India’s T20 team for the Asia Cup is neither a surprise nor out of place.Barring the 2024 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), when he didn’t play his full quota of matches and finished 12th among the top-scorers that year, Gill has either topped the batting charts in the T20 league in the remaining seasons over the last five years or has managed to figure in the top five.

In fact, when he top scored in the 2023 edition with 870 runs, it was only second to the most number of runs ever scored by a batter in the IPL — 973 runs in 2016 by Virat Kohli. It was Gill’s season with the bat and the rest were merely spectators soaking it all in.

The kind of aggression, consistency, approach and leadership that Gill has managed to show in the last few years of the IPL — the single-biggest platform that allows the selectors to do their T20 math before putting together a good team — didn’t leave Ajit Agarkar and his team with much of a choice but to bring him in.

In a squad of 15, there was no chance of leaving the man aside.But then there are those who might ask, why the vice-captaincy? Has Gill done enough to slip into the leadership role in the shortest format, or is it a natural extension of the role he’s acquired in Test cricket, where BCCI’s possibly indicating that he could be India’s future all-format captain? Is Gill set to follow MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma and be the fourth in line very soon?23 years and 146 days23 years and 146 days - Shubman Gill's age when he scored his only T20I hundred, against New Zealand in Ahmedabad on February 1, 2023, making him the youngest Indian to score hundreds in all three formats in international cricket.Well, now that we’ve concluded that his selection in the team is by no degree an unwarranted one, let’s move on to understanding why his elevation as vice-captain in not unwarranted either.

As much as the sport derives traction from the field, there’s a lot that happens off it also that keeps the Indian cricket ticking — revenues, broadcast, sponsorships, fan engagement and more. Every now and then, when broadcast rights or sponsorship slots go on sale, the cricket board ends up burning the midnight oil trying to figure the right value.In any kind of value creation, only brand and consistency matter. From the days of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, to 2007 when India struck the T20 goldmine and MS Dhoni emerged, to 2015 onwards, when Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma singlehandedly moved the brand needle in Indian cricket to the next level — there’s always been a face that Indian cricket could identify with.

In 2024, ‘who next?’ was the question that began to pop up inside BCCI boardrooms. It is in search of this space that the cricket board began identifying Shubman Gill. It wasn’t some random out-of-the-blue selection hunch that elevated him to Test captaincy earlier this year. It isn’t some random selection hunch that’s elevated him to T20 captaincy either.Tuesday’s selection had a massive future connotation to it.