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Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.
Ben Stokes earned the Lord Megachief of Gold 2022 title largely off the back of his transformational captaincy of an England team that had previously been very shit. Shubman Gill is Lord Megachief of Gold 2025 for his transformational captaincy of himself.
Honourable mentions
Mitchell Starc had a real hot streak for a month or two. However, while he took 6-9(!), 7-58 and 6-75 in successive matches, he played eight other Tests in which he failed to take more than three wickets in an innings. We kind of love Starc and he would have been the easiest player to write about because we could have gone on about all his undervalued qualities again, but as admirable as they are, low-cost three-fors aren’t really what we’re after here, even if a number of them did come in conditions that didn’t aid fast bowling.
Over at the top of the New Zealand order, Devon Conway hit three hundreds, including a double, and Rachin Ravindra hit two and averaged 117.25, but they only played five Tests, which isn’t really enough. This is a growing problem for the one-person Lord Megachief of Gold adjudication panel.
Similarly, if it weren’t for the fact he only turned up halfway through the year, Simon Harmer might have made the strongest case. He took 30 wickets in four Tests at 14.3 and was justifiably player of the series for South Africa’s 2-0 win in India. But four Tests is not enough.
Shubman Gill: Lord Megachief of Gold
India’s captain kind of missed that South Africa series after suffering neck spasms (which sound very, very horrible) midway through the first Test. Would they have won had he been present? Probably not. The only obvious upside to Gill’s captaincy so far has been the effect it has had on his batting.
In his very first innings as leader, against England at Headingley, he made 147. In marked contrast to one of his predecessors, he was only semi-livid about this feat.
Gill continued his ambiguous celebratory facial messaging in the next Test when he made 269 in the first innings. Then he had another go after making 161 in the second. This was very silly stuff; almost as silly as seeing fit to set England 608 runs to win.
Speaking afterwards, Gill pointed out that India aren’t really used to these kinds of matches any more – not many home Tests last five days. “Luckily, most of the days when we are playing here, we are batting and not fielding,” he pointed out.
Gill himself spent 12 and a half hours batting in that match, which might partly explain why he didn’t make too many in the Lord’s Test that started four days later. He did however add a further ton (a trifling 103) at Old Trafford and then three innings against the West Indies later in the year were enough for him to add a 50 and 129 not out.
All in all, this is a lot of batting from a man who hadn’t previously shown any extraordinary aptitude for such endeavours. The year as a whole brought him 983 runs at 70.21 and he currently averages 79.16 as captain.
Where did this come from? He averaged 35.05 in the 32 Tests leading up to his appointment, which is the kind of nondescript shrug-inducing zone where you’ll find the likes of Mike Gatting, Marcus North, Litton Das, Alviro Petersen, John Crawley, Shaun Marsh, Ollie Pope, Wasim Jaffer, Shane Watson and Lou Vincent. Oh and also Ben Stokes.
Just eight matches as captain have lifted Gill out of that company and ahead of Desmond Haynes, Sourav Ganguly, Ian Chappell and Graham Gooch.
As changes in status go, it was almost as marked and rapid as Sean Connery peeling off his frogman outfit to reveal an immaculate white tuxedo underneath at the start of Goldfinger.
During the England tour, we theorised this shift was actually a form of escapism. Escapism is possibly not the word. Avoidance.
When Stokes hit him with a bouncer at Old Trafford, Gill shed his gloves to reveal hands that were by that point 90 per cent Elastoplast. The mental pain seemed greater, however, and the mental pain had nothing to do with what had just happened to his hands. To our eyes, Gill’s greatest fear is captaincy. He therefore continued avoiding doing any of it by making his way to three figures.
We asked at the time whether this brand of self-care is sustainable. Will Gill be driven to ever-greater feats of captaincy avoidance, perhaps culminating in five solid days of batting without a declaration? The speed with which he distanced himself from Gatting et al certainly makes such an eventuality plausible.
Five minutes ago, the man was emerging from the water with a seagull on his head. A handful of explosions and the shedding of his outer layer and now he’s standing there ordering a martini with a carnation in his lapel.
Congratulations, Shubman Gill, you are 2025’s Lord Megachief of Gold.