The question is not simply whether Gill can win another Test. It is whether he is establishing an identity as a captain.

Indian skipper Shubman Gill. (FILE photo)

Gill has spoken about being comfortable in the role, and about India taking “all the right steps in the right direction.” The next step is seeing whether his ideas can bring consistent success.

“I’m very comfortable with the role, and I think the kind of way we have been progressing in the past one year has been very pleasing to see, in my perspective. I think we are taking all the right steps in the right direction,” he said before the Galle Test.

After his maiden assignment in England last year, the first Test at Galle gave the clearest indication yet of what that identity could look like.

Gill’s approach has so far been defined more by individual decisions than by a clear method. At Galle, though, those decisions looked connected: he backed his players, attacked with the ball, and kept looking for ways to create pressure.

He trusted Manav Suthar on his first Test outside India, bowling him ahead of Ravindra Jadeja and Kuldeep Yadav in the first innings and handing him the new ball in the second. The left-arm spinner responded with a match haul of 10 for 131, including 6 for 55 in the second innings.

Gill made a similar call with Prasidh Krishna. With speculation that Gurnoor Brar could debut, Gill backed Prasidh instead, saying it was the best he had seen the pacer bowl. The 30-year-old has long had the attributes to trouble batsmen, height, bounce, awkward lift, but consistency has deserted him.

He repaid the captain’s faith with a match haul of 3 for 63. He broke the 146-run Niroshan Dickwella-Sonal Dinusha partnership in the first innings. But his second-innings spell was more revealing. Gill used him for eight overs on Day 4, and Prasidh responded with a probing 1 for 13.

Coming from around the wicket, Prasidh dismissed Kamindu Mendis with a short-of-length delivery, extracting extra bounce and forcing a loose slash to slip. Against Dhananjaya de Silva, he consistently found away movement and surprised him with the ball coming in. Against Lahiru Udara, he varied fuller balls nipping back in with shorter ones.

The captain’s encouraging words before the match seemed to have had the desired effect.

Questions still persist about how much of Gill’s tactical thinking is his own, and how much reflects coach Gautam Gambhir. Those doubts could clear as Gill’s body of work grows. But once players cross the boundary rope, the onus is on the captain to make things work.

At Galle, Gill did exactly that. Ajinkya Rahane later praised his proactive bowling changes and field placements. Colombo now gives Gill the chance to show that Galle was not a one-off.

Shubman Gill scores a century. (FILE photo)

That matters, because the challenge facing Gill is bigger than winning one Test. His early captaincy was encouraging: 754 runs in England, an enthralling 2-2 series draw, a dominant home performance against the West Indies. But South Africa exposed the first cracks, with India losing 2-0.

Colombo’s setting recalls Kohli, but Gill doesn’t need to copy him. What matters more is how Kohli handled players like Ishant.

Kohli’s role was not to transform Ishant into a different bowler. It was to back him, demand greater discipline, and eventually get the best out of him.

Prasidh has the height and bounce to trouble batsmen, but consistency has often kept him from becoming a reliable wicket-taking threat. Like Ishant before him, Prasidh may not need to become a different bowler. He may only need a captain willing to trust his strengths and demand reliability in his lines and lengths, and through that, help him find the consistency that’s eluded him.

Gill showed real promise as captain in England, but he has yet to win a major series abroad. Sri Lanka offers that opportunity now. A 2-0 sweep would not place him alongside Kohli overnight, but it would be his first significant overseas win as Test captain, and it could mark Colombo as the place where his leadership began to show its own identity.

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