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Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honor in cricket. The title recognizes achievements in the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.
Ben Stokes earned the Lord Megachief of Gold 2022 title largely due to his transformational captaincy of a previously very poor England team. Shubman Gill is Lord Megachief of Gold 2025 due to his transformational captaincy of himself.
Honorable mentions
Mitchell Starc was on a real hot streak for a whole month or two. Although 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 like Starc quite a bit and he would have been the easiest player to write about as we could have gone on and on about all his underrated qualities, but as admirable as they are, cheap three-fors aren’t really what we’re looking for here, even if a number of them came in conditions that didn’t promote fast bowling.
At the top of the New Zealand rankings, 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-man jury of Lord Megachief of Gold.
And if he hadn’t only shown up halfway through the year, Simon Harmer might have made the strongest argument. He took 30 wickets in four Tests at 14.3 and was deservedly named 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
The India captain missed that South Africa series a bit after suffering from neck cramps (which sounds really, really awful) midway through the first Test. Would they have won if he had been there? Probably not. The only clear benefit of Gill’s captaincy so far is the effect it has had on his batting.
In his very first innings in charge, against England at Headingley, he made 147. In stark contrast to one of his predecessors, he was only semi-furious about this performance.
Gill continued his ambiguous celebratory face messages in the next Test when he made 269 in the first innings. Then he got another try after making 161 in the second. This was very stupid; almost as foolish as it saw fit to allow England to win by 608 runs.
Afterwards, Gill pointed out that India are not really used to these types of matches anymore – not many home Tests last five days. “Luckily most of the days we play here we are batting and not fielding,” he noted.
Gill himself spent 12 and a half hours batting in that match, which might partly explain why he didn’t make as many in the Lord’s Test that started four days later. However, he added another ton (an insignificant 103) at Old Trafford and then three innings against the West Indies later in the year was enough for him to add a 50 and 129 not out.
All in all, this is a lot of nonsense from a man who had not previously shown any extraordinary aptitude for such endeavors. The year as a whole saw him score 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 prior to his appointment, which is the kind of unremarkable 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 games as captain has taken Gill out of that company, ahead of Desmond Haynes, Sourav Ganguly, Ian Chappell and Graham Gooch.
As the status changes, it was almost as striking and fast as Sean Connery taking off his frogman outfit to reveal a pristine white tuxedo underneath at the beginning of Goldfinger.
During the UK tour we thought this shift was actually a form of escapism. Escapism may not be the right word. Avoidance.
When Stokes hit him with a bouncer at Old Trafford, Gill took off his gloves to reveal hands that at the time were 90 percent elastoplast. However, the mental pain seemed greater and the mental pain had nothing to do with what had just happened to his hands. In our eyes, Gill’s biggest fear is captaincy. He therefore continued to do nothing by going to three figures.
At the time, we wondered whether this type of self-care was sustainable. Will Gill be driven to greater and greater feats of captaincy avoidance, perhaps culminating in five solid days of batting without explanation? The speed with which he distanced himself from Gatting et al certainly makes such a possibility plausible.
Five minutes ago the man emerged from the water with a seagull on his head. A handful of explosions and the release of his outer layer and now he’s standing there ordering a martini with a carnation in his lapel.
Congratulations, Shubman Gill, you are the 2025 Lord Megachief of Gold.
Lord Megachiefs of Gold
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