Players to watch IPL 2019. Best Young Players in the IPL 2019

Who is the most exciting young player in the IPL this year? Well if you ask me KKR's young right-handed stroke maker is definitely one of the brightest young stars of the tournament and following his debut season last year and his first 2 caps for the ODI team, I am keen to see how Gill kicks on from here.

With India still not 100% settled on their middle order options for the World Cup, this year's IPL represents an outside chance for Shubman Gill to grab a last minute spot on the flight to England this summer. Given the immense talent of the man I wouldn't put it past him although I don't believe that the T20 format is necessarily the best stage on which he can demonstrate his full potential.

I myself have been following the career of Gill for some time. I created his everipedia page over 12 months ago at a time when he didn't even have a page on wikipedia and I'm somewhat surprised to see that no one has updated that content since given the fact that he is now a full international and has been scoring runs for fun in domestic cricket! I also included him in one of my team's of the week when I was writing about the IPL on steemit this time last year.

The point I made in that steemit blog about Gill's role in the KKR team still stands. He spent a large amount of last year batting at 6 or even 7 which restricted his chances to really build an innings and move through the gears. He is a stroke-maker as opposed to an out and out bludgeoner of the cricket ball so to expect him to come in and tea off from the first ball was never likely to bring him success.

The place in the side that he must target initially is that of Robin Uthappa who spent much of last season batting at number 3 with fairly limited success. Gill has both the technique and mentality to anchor the innings from that position as well as the flair and natural talent to ensure that he is not damaging the scoring rate in the process. When you consider the raw hitting power that KKR possess in Lynn, Narine, Russell and Karthik then Gill could provide the ideal foil for a side that only just missed out on the final last time around.

The above scoring charts for KKR last year show that while Gill was not spectacular he more than held his own within a side that has some exceptional T20 talent. Since then he has gone on to average in excess of 100 in the recently completed Ranji trophy which included this innings of 268 against Tamil Nadu.

At 1.78m of height, Gill is that bit taller than the average Indian batsman and he uses that added reach to great effect in stroking the ball through the off-side with dreamy timing. Certainly from the highlights above you can see that you don't want to give him any width to work with because he is going to punish you. However, what I like about Gill is that unlike some batsmen (and in England terms, I'm thinking Hales and Bairstow here) he doesn't need to move to leg in order to access the cover region. In fact, he's quite happy to whip the ball through or over midwicket with a couple of signature shots to boot.

Take for example the short arm jab that he can play (44 seconds into the highlights video below) - Gill was named the player of the tournament for the 2018 U19 World Cup.

If the shot looks kind of familiar then that's because it's a near clone of this shot that Virat Kohli plays. It's fair to say that just as Kohli would have been compared to Tendulkar as a young player, all players of Gill's generation and particularly elegant right-handers, will be held up against Kohli.

Gill's ability to access both sides of the wicket with his strokeplay will be essential to his success in this year's IPL and I'm keen to see what he has added to his game since I saw him play in last year's tournament. Hopefully he'll be given the chance to play in today's game against SRH and hopefully, he'll be pushed up the order so that he's given the best opportunity to showcase his obvious talent.