Gujarat Titans’ new period below the captaincy of younger opener Shubman Gill had a bittersweet starting in IPL 2024. The 2022 champions started this season by defeating their outdated skipper Hardik Pandya‘s Mumbai Indians by six runs. However, their IPL 2023 last rivals Chennai Super Kings edged previous them by 63 runs on Tuesday at Chepauk. Chasing a whopping goal of 207 towards Ruturaj Gaikwad and co, GT managed to attain solely 143 runs and confronted their largest defeat by way of runs.

Ever-since Hardik switched to MI, there have been talks relating to Gill’s function as a captain of GT. Recently, former India pacer S Sreesanth opened up about Gill and said that the absence of Hardik is a blessing in disguise for GT.

“There is no Hardik in Gujarat Titans to tell the bowlers what to bowl. Sometimes you need to give the bowler that freedom to bowl. This time the captain is Gill, and I’m sure Ashish bhai (Ashish Nehra) will say ‘let them bowl’. Bowlers will also take responsibility with a young captain and sometimes, this is the advantage of having a young captain,” Sreesanth stated on FanCode.

Against CSK, Gill did not reside as much as expectations as he scored solely 8 runs off 5 balls, earlier than getting dismissed by Deepak Chahar.

“They outplayed us when we were batting, their execution was spot on. We backed ourselves to get a decent score in the powerplay and once we didn’t, we were always playing catch-up. It was unfortunate for us. In T20 you can always talk about 10-15 runs here or there, end of the day it’s about how much they got. On this wicket, we were expecting to chase 190-200. I think it’s a great learning for the bowlers,” Gill stated after the match.

“I think it’s better to have this kind of game early on in the tournament rather than in the middle or late. We always expected to chase 190-200, it was a really good wicket. Felt like we let ourselves down while batting. (On captaincy) Lot of new learnings, new experiences and different things. It’s exciting to captain a team like Gujarat Titans, we’ve made it to the finals in the last couple of years so very exciting,” he added.

GT will now be squaring off towards Sunrisers Hyderabad of their IPL 2024 match on Sunday in Ahmedabad.