No chill Gill: Just a run-glutton on the loose at Edgbaston

Victoria Square was abuzz on Thursday, gearing up for the award-winning Colmore Food Festival, one of Birmingham's busiest summer weekends, where over 30 pop-ups and thousands of visitors spill into the city centre in search of flavour and indulgence. It's a place for second helpings, for food discovery, for feasts shared and savoured. For Shubman Gill, the main course arrived a day early. A couple of miles away at Edgbaston, the Indian captain tucked in, not with noise or novelty, but with quiet resolve and appetite, portioning his intake across four and a half sessions and leaving England tired at the end of it.

In all, he was at the crease for 509 minutes, the longest the Bazballers have had to bowl at any single batter. But, Gill's batting has always been about time. About having it, especially against the quickest bowlers. Against Brydon Carse, who was touching 90 miles per hour in his early spells, Gill had enough to wait and maneuver the ball softly through a narrowing cordon for a single.

Three innings into this England tour, his batting has quickly become about knowing what to do with time once it's his. This 269 at Edgbaston deepened that relationship: a young captain turning time into a tool, and the innings itself into something nearly timeless. When he got to 200, he offered a bow, his usual gesture with a touch of flourish in the arm. In this part of the world, it still carries meaning. After this innings, they might well reciprocate. Even before today, he had the title, out of succession, but now, surely, he is batting royalty, of the next generation he already leads. And he batted like a royal: unhurried, assured, immovable. As England assistant coach Jeetan Patel summed up: they threw everything at him. Nothing got past.

This has always been part of his batting lexicon. The most famous Gill origin story is, in essence, about batting long: how his father Lakhwinder Singh would pay his farm workers at his orchard INR 100 as prize money if they could get Gill out and would end up chucking balls at the little boy through the day.

Former India cricketer Aashish Kapoor, now an assistant coach at Gujarat Titans, often reminds Gill of an early memory from an Under-16 match against Uttar Pradesh. Punjab had conceded a first-innings lead of over 100 and were later set a target close to 400. Gill, Kapoor recalls, simply said that if they batted normally in the remaining time, they'd get the runs. And then, with his team slipping to 60 for 4, followed through with an unbeaten double hundred while his good friend Abhishek Sharma made 180.

Day Two at Edgbaston was all about that same belief. Gill kept batting, serenely, and found two left-handed partners in Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar, who stuck with him long enough to stitch stands of 203 and 144 for the sixth and seventh wickets. What had been a precarious 211 for 5 was rebuilt into a mammoth total of 587.

It was exactly what he had asked of his team on the eve of the match: once you're in, hunker down and bat. And it was what he had prepared for. Most batters in the India XI choose not to bat on the eve of a Test, to conserve energy or avoid any last-minute twitch in technique. Not Gill. He has always batted two days out in full sessions, and then returned for top-up hits the evening before. It was interesting to see if captaincy might nudge him toward the popular route. But Gill was still out there on Tuesday, batting the longest, only stopping once assistant coach Sitanshu Kotak walked up for a fist bump and called it a day.

Large portions of Thursday felt like an extension of that net. As Ben Stokes cycled through his bowling options and eventually turned to part-timers like Harry Brook and Joe Root, Gill's concentration held. His shots remained responses, not statements, each one an answer to the question posed, never a move ahead of it. When Brook overpitched, Gill leaned in and sent two straight drives to the rope with that willowy grace. Even the few moments of premeditation, like the reverse sweeps against Shoaib Bashir, arrived only after he and Jadeja had seen off the morning hour against the second new ball.

What Gill's eight-and-a-half-hour vigil brought India was substance, the kind they sorely lacked from a position of dominance in Leeds. But more crucially, it changed the familiar pattern of play that Stokes & Co. have mastered. Never since the start of the Bazball era had they fielded for as long in a home Test as they did here. "Spending 151 overs in the dirt in any scenario is pretty tough. There's some tired minds and tired bodies," assistant coach Jeetan Patel admitted.

Unlike Headingley, where England began their innings with a buzz after restricting India to a total far below what it was headed toward, here they emerged leggy. It showed. Their footwork was sluggish, their judgement cloudy, and they soon slipped to 25 for 3 inside eight overs, as Akash Deep and Mohammed Siraj bowled outstanding opening spells.

Playing for a draw isn't in the Bazball playbook. But it could become a consideration. But even if it does, it will force England to approach the rest of the three differently to how they had in Leeds. They are more than 500 runs behind, and with another Test looming quickly at Lord's, the aftertaste of Edgbaston's toil may linger longer than they'd like.

This, in essence, was what Gill had asked of his team: to play the long game, to try and take one result off the table and see how England responded when tempo alone couldn't pull them out. And the remarkable thing was: he didn't just say it, he batted it. For all the silk and serenity, there was steel beneath. A quiet hardness. Coming into this series with a strangely modest Test average in the mid-30s and a top score of just 128, Gill left doubts about his appetite that may have been clouded by the nature of the pitches previously. Three innings into the series, he's pushed that average past 40. Not in a blaze, but with the quiet greed of a run-glutton who knows exactly what he wants, and now, finally, how to wait for it.