Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Kagiso Rabada and Washington Sundar join Rashid Khan to form a strong attack

ESPNcricinfo staff24-Mar-20253:04

Cricinformed: Can Gill up his intent in IPL 2025?

Shubman Gill is determined to use the learnings from his maiden season as IPL captain, where Gujarat Titans finished eighth in 2024, to raise his team’s performance in IPL 2025.”Last year was definitely a learning curve for me,” Gill said ahead of GT’s opening game against Punjab Kings in Ahmedabad on Tuesday. “Captaincy is such a thing – the more you do it, the more you learn about yourself, and the more you learn about the game. There were some aspects that I definitely learned and experienced last year which I think would be very helpful for me this year.”At the start of the new season, Gill is focused on understanding his new team-mates better. “It’s like an overall growth that I would want to have within myself as a captain,” he said. “Maybe it could be talking with the players off the field or it could be anything. Having those one-on-one conversations with them where they open up to you, where they tell you what are the areas that they want to improve, or what are the areas that I want them to be able to improve to help my team.”Gill also underlined the need to bat better in the powerplay, a phase where GT were the slowest scoring team last season with a run rate of 7.72. Key to that improvement will be his partnership with his new opening partner Jos Buttler.”Honestly, yes, we didn’t [bat well] in the powerplay, we weren’t the best team in the tournament last year, but before that we had some good opening partnerships with me and Sai [Sudharsan]. Having said that, Wriddhi [Wriddhiman Saha] got injured in between.”[Mohammed] Shami got injured. It’s not easy to have so many different combinations when your players are getting injured constantly. Leading up to that obviously someone like Hardik [Pandya] went to MI, so I think in overall sense it was a bit tough for us to find the perfect combination as a team.”At the mega auction in November, GT assembled a solid bowling group. Among the key players they signed were Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Kagiso Rabada and Washington Sundar to complement Rashid Khan.”This year, we have a fantastic group. I feel we have covered all the bases, we have good depth in the batting, we have some very good bowlers, especially fast bowlers. IPL is a kind of a tournament where everybody really focuses on scoring 250-260-270, but it’s the bowlers that win you matches.”It’s the bowlers that would help you not concede those many runs. Doesn’t matter how many runs you score, if you are able to concede those then it doesn’t matter how many runs you are scoring. Especially for us, our philosophy is to have a really strong and stable bowling side.”We are hoping that we will be able to play the same bowling attack for the 14 games, but if anything happens we have good back-up as well. I think we have got Ishi [Ishant Sharma] . I don’t need to say much about him. He has been playing IPL since the inception of IPL and he has got great experience to him and I think we have got some really good young bowlers in our team as well.”