Gill and Sai Sudharsan 'have learnt how to move through the gears'

Gujarat Titans (GT) are in the IPL 2025 playoffs. They are topping the points table at the moment with nine wins from 12 games. Their players are leading both the Orange and Purple Cap tables. And while they are doing all this by being a solid "team", the two opening batters are the ones grabbing all the headlines. Understandably. B Sai Sudharsan and Shubman Gill are the only two batters across the ten teams to have scored 600-plus runs this season. And they have been able to do that because, as Tom Moody says, "both of them have five gears they can shift to".

The unbroken double-century stand on Sunday night in Delhi was only the latest instance of Gill and Sai Sudharsan batting long, batting deep, batting fast without looking like they are.

"I think the way they dovetail together as an opening pair, they seem to really understand each other's game," Moody said on ESPNcricinfo Time Out. "One seems to fall in behind the other if one's really got off to a flier. So they cover each other and there seems to be a pattern in that throughout the season. And just their traditional strokeplay."

The 205 they scored against Delhi Capitals was their best this season, but they have scored 839 runs as a pair already, scoring at an average of 76.27. Three times they have put up century stands. That's immense in T20 cricket, especially if they add up to the team winning, which has been the case with GT. At times, it has looked like the opposition bowlers just don't have enough tricks to put pressure on them.

"How do you build the pressure? By bowling dot balls. Those two are so good, not just in this game; if you see the other games also, where the pitches were a little tricky, they are so good [at] running between the wickets, that really makes their life easier," Piyush Chawla said. "When you are bowling a good ball as a bowler, you look for a dot ball or a wicket. They turn that into a single. And when there is a ball to hit for a boundary, they are never missing those chances as well.

"I remember one game against KKR (Kolkata Knight Riders) when they played at Eden Gardens. It was a difficult pitch to bat on, but again Shubman Gill made that pitch look totally different, and when the other batters were batting, it looked like they were batting on a different surface. That's the quality of these two."

It's not like Gill and Sai Sudharsan don't hit big shots. Gill has 54 fours and 23 sixes this season, and Sai Sudharsan 68 and 20. No one has hit more fours this season than Sai Sudharsan, and only Yashasvi Jaiswal of Rajasthan Royals (RR) has hit more fours (55 to 54) than Gill. On the sixes tally, only six batters have hit more than Gill's 23.

But what's really worked for the pair is that they haven't - like Chawla pointed out - let too many balls go unscored of. Not just them. Jos Buttler has been similar. GT have the lowest dot-ball percentage in their batting innings among all the teams: 387 dot balls from the 1396 they have faced gives them a percentage of 27.72%. The next lowest is 31.36%, for DC.

"What it shows you is the class of that batting pair. They are proper batters that have the technique that can weather any storm but also... they have both developed this over time, they have learnt how to move through the gears," Moody said. "They may have only had three gears in previous years, both of them have five gears they can shift to."