Shubman Gill and Deepti Sharma have won the BCCI awards for best men’s and women’s international cricketers of 2022-23. Gill won the men’s award, named after the former India captain Polly Umrigar, for the first time in his career, while Deepti won the women’s award for the second time – she also won it for the 2019-20 season.
Gill made the step up from exciting prospect to international superstar in 2022-23 (the award timeframe runs from October 1 to September 30), enjoying incredible returns with the bat particularly in ODIs, in which he scored a world-leading tally of 1418 runs at an average of 64.45, with five hundreds including a double-century against New Zealand in Hyderabad. In the same period, Gill also scored 387 runs at 35.18 in seven Tests, and 304 runs at a strike rate of 146.85 in 11 T20Is.
Deepti, meanwhile, was a key member of an India side that won the Women’s Asia Cup and the Asian Games gold medal in a year packed with T20I action. The offspinner picked up 38 wickets – the fifth-most in the world in the award period, and the most by a bowler from a Full Member nation – in T20Is at an average of 14.81 and an economy rate of 5.71, while also contributing 313 runs with the bat, including two half-centuries, at an average of 28.45. Deepti only played three ODIs and no Tests in the award period, but carried her form into a triumphant 2023-24 home season, taking 11 wickets at 10.81 and scoring 165 runs at 55.00 as India beat England and Australia in one-off Tests in Mumbai.
Shastri wins lifetime achievement award
Former India allrounder Ravi Shastri, meanwhile, has been bestowed the BCCI’s lifetime achievement award. A versatile batter who played multiple roles through his career – he had a particularly impressive record as opener outside Asia – and an accurate left-arm fingerspinner, he finished with 3830 Test runs at an average of 35.79 and 151 wickets at 40.96.
After knee injuries ended his playing career when he was still only in his early 30s, Shastri moved effortlessly into TV commentary, where he established himself as an incisive voice with a distinctively punchy manner of calling big moments. While he only got to captain India in one of his 80 Tests, he got a wider canvas to express his skills as a tactician and man-manager as coach: his stints at the helm of India’s men’s team from 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2021 coincided with their rise as an all-formats, all-conditions force. Under him India became a near-invincible Test team at home and achieved unprecedented levels of competitiveness away from home, most memorably winning two successive series in Australia in 2018-19 and 2020-21.
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