Sometimes, Shubman Gill plays the most absurd shots.
Take the first boundary he hit on Saturday night against Rajasthan Royals (RR) in Jaipur, involving a most unusual combination of movements. Much of it was premeditated - a shuffle out of his crease and towards the leg side. Tushar Deshpande saw him coming, shortened his length, and angled the ball in so it would have finished somewhere near the top of middle and leg or perhaps even the top of leg.
It would have cramped most batters, but Gill sashayed another step to the leg side and played the perfect back-cut, bisecting backward point and deep third.
In the next over of the Gujarat Titans (GT) innings, he played an even better shot. Once again, he left his crease early, and this time Jofra Archer banged the ball into a hard length and got the bounce to around chest height in the off-stump corridor. This time, Gill hopped lightly to ride the bounce, and met the ball with a minimal straight-bat jab to send it racing away in front of cover point.
These are deliveries most batters would feel rushed by if they are moving towards the ball and minimising the space and time available to them. Gill played them like a schoolboy shadow-batting with an umbrella while skipping down the street.
The ease of Gill's strokeplay is one of the reasons why he is a slightly misunderstood T20 cricketer. He bats with such a high degree of control, and while hitting the ball in the air less frequently than most of his contemporaries, that he tends to get looked at as a somewhat old-fashioned opener.
There are a couple of other reasons too. IPL discourse tends to club Gill and his opening partner B Sai Sudharsan into one entity, leading to a blurring of their differences. And the events of recent months - during which Gill went from T20I vice-captain to being dropped from the side - have also cast him in a manufactured contrast to the top-order dashers who fired India to the T20 World Cup title.
The reality is a little different. It's clear from the graphic above that Priyansh Arya, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Abhishek Sharma are playing a different game to everyone else in the powerplay in IPL 2026. But look at Gill's strike rate in this phase, and look at the names around him - he's only a few decimal points off Travis Head and Prabhsimran Singh.
On Saturday, it was easy to watch the opening exchanges of RR vs GT and miss how well Gill was batting. RR sprayed the new ball around to a shocking degree - there were six wides in just the first three overs, and a buffet of half-volleys and wide long-hops through the powerplay - and it seemed as if GT's openers were merely feasting on hit-me bowling.
But watch the highlights again, and it's clear that Gill was putting a frazzled bowling attack under even more pressure with his stealthy pre-ball movements and ruthless punishment of marginal errors.
It was an illustration of the methods Gill has employed to keep pace with the likes of Head and Prabhsimran in the powerplay.
But perhaps his best work on the night came after the fields spread, when GT discovered that this Jaipur pitch had far more grip for the spinners than they had initially assumed. For a brief period, this realisation was accompanied by a slowdown: from 39 off 19 balls at the end of the seventh over, Gill scored just 11 off his next 11 balls.
GT had looked set to push towards 250 at one stage, but the conditions had led Gill and Sai Sudharsan to reassess.
"That's what we thought as well [scoring 250], you know, let's see, let's keep trying to put the bowlers under pressure and see what score we get, but it wasn't easy to hit spinners through the line or at will," Gill said during the presentation ceremony. "So we thought let's keep wickets in hand and try to bat deep."
Having got to grips with the conditions, though, Gill made a decisive push, rushing from 50 off 30 to 67 off 35 in an exhilarating passage of play where he relinquished control in the pursuit of boundaries. He enjoyed a bit of luck - a slog-sweep burst through Shimron Hetmyer's hands as he came in too far from deep midwicket, and a miscue over the covers landed agonisingly wide of the same fielder - but along the way, he showed off his range against spin, including a dancing, inside-out loft over extra-cover and a standing reverse-swat over backward point.
The spin-friendliness of the conditions became even more apparent during RR's chase. At the toss, Gill had announced that the fast bowler Prasidh Krishna would be GT's impact player, but they brought in the left-arm spinner R Sai Kishore instead. The legspinner Rashid Khan ripped through RR's middle and lower order, picking up 4 for 33.
Across the match, five batters faced at least ten balls of spin. Of them, four ended with strike rates of 130 or lower. Gill scored 42 off 24 against spin, at 175.00.
This wasn't unexpected. Across the IPLs of 2025 and 2026, Gill is one of only five batters to have scored 200-plus runs against spin at a 50-plus average and 150-plus strike rate. Over this period, his 460 runs against spin (more than anyone else in the league) have come at an average of 92.00 and a strike rate of 163.12. For context, Heinrich Klaasen, renowned globally for his ability to take down spin, has gone at 168.42 across these two seasons.
Gill, then, has carved a niche of his own in the IPL. The likes of Arya, Sooryavanshi and Abhishek may have pulled well ahead of everyone else, but Gill keeps pace with most other elite powerplay hitters. And he dominates spin while seldom getting out to it. He does all this with a languid, effortless air, but don't let that blind you to the level he operates at.
