🇮🇳 Shubman Gill

He was born in Fazilka, Punjab, on the Pakistan border, in September 1999, the only son of Lakhwinder Singh Gill, a farmer obsessed with cricket, and Keart Kaur. The family moved to Mohali specifically so that Shubman could train at the PCA. He was the youngest cricketer in his age-group net for years. By twelve he had a triple-century in school cricket. By sixteen he had a place in the Punjab Under-19 side. By eighteen he had won the Under-19 World Cup with India in New Zealand in 2018, finishing as the tournament's player of the series with 372 runs at 124.

He played for Kolkata Knight Riders from 2018 to 2021 and for Gujarat Titans from 2022 onwards. The 2023 IPL was the breakout: 890 runs in the season, the Orange Cap, three centuries — including 129 off 60 against Mumbai Indians at Ahmedabad in the qualifier, a knock that the IPL commentary box for once allowed itself to call generational. He top-scored in the final, fell agonisingly to a stunning catch, and watched Chennai win by five runs.

His Test debut came on Boxing Day 2020 at Melbourne, the famous Adelaide-36-all-out tour. He opened the batting against Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc, scored 45 and 35* on debut, and was 91 not out at lunch on day five at the Gabba in January 2021 in the chase of 328 — the final morning of the Australian fortress era. Rishabh Pant finished the job. Gill was, at twenty-one, already a fixture.

The 2023 calendar year was the breakout the country had been waiting for. He scored 1,584 runs in international cricket — the most by an Indian in a calendar year other than Sachin Tendulkar in 1998. He scored three ODI double-centuries before his 25th birthday — Hyderabad 2023 (208 against NZ), Trivandrum (2023) and Mohali (2023), each played at a tempo that suggested he had read the format from a textbook the rest of the world had not yet received. He averaged 65.85 in ODIs that year, the highest of any batter in the world.

Test cricket, the format he most reveres, was harder. He moved up to No. 3 in 2023 after Cheteshwar Pujara was dropped, struggled briefly in England, and then in 2024 scored a maiden Test double — 119* and the unbeaten partnership with KL Rahul that saved the Visakhapatnam Test against England. In Perth in November 2024, on an exceptional pitch, his second-innings 31 was the highest score by an Indian batter in the match other than Yashasvi Jaiswal. He was named Test vice-captain in October 2024 under Rohit Sharma. Inside the BCCI, the succession plan beyond Sharma is no longer a secret.

He grew up sharing a wall with Sehwag posters and a notebook of Rahul Dravid's cover-drive geometry, and the result has been a batter who can play both the Bollywood pull and the textbook leave in the same over. He is unmarried, intensely private about his romantic life, and the subject of an Indian-media subgenre devoted to which actress he is supposedly dating that week. He has said, repeatedly, that captaining India in a World Cup final is the only thing he has ever wanted. The country, in 2026, is queueing up to give him the chance.