OPINION
Follow UsThe first ball of Rishabh Pant’s innings at Edgbaston was a defensive push. Pant wanted a run to get off the mark, despite hitting it straight to Ben Stokes placed in short covers. Virat Kohli sent him back and burst into a smile about the silliness of the thought. Stokes had a similar expression on his face.
Maybe Pant was nervous. Or maybe he just wanted the early relief of getting off the mark. But the up and down career he has had so far, there is no harm in the former. After all, international cricket has not been kind to Pant.
Despite all the success, which failures have surrounded him in almost equal measures, the 24-year-old has had his demons to fight. For starters, he has taken a lot of flak from the fans themselves. The reasons are manifolds. He joined the team as MS Dhoni’s successor, his ridiculously ridiculous style of batting and simply the impatience of the fans.
While these factors were beyond his control, Pant also didn’t help his case by constantly hitting unceremonious roadblocks in white-ball cricket - T20 cricket to be precise. But one part of the game where Pant has justified his potential, in fact, he is climbing the echelons of greatness, is Test cricket. The last four months capture these shifting moods of Pant’s career perfectly.
He suffered another ordinary year in the Indian Premier League, enduring his first season without a single 50-plus score. But the worse was the home series against South Africa, where, as the stand-in captain, Pant scored only 57 runs in four innings. There were irrefutable question marks on his place in the side in a World Cup year. The team management backed him but the whole situation brings light to Pant’s dwindling fortunes in white-ball cricket.
But cometh Test cricket, the first day of it, Rishabh Pant has shown what a champion player he is.
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He walked in at a tricky point. Earning a promotion to number five, the scoreboard read 64/3. It soon became 71/4 with the jolt of Kohli’s dismissal. Facing the ‘New England’, in a new summer, India were facing the same old problems - the top-order getting rattled in their first exposure to new conditions.
Pant didn’t score a boundary in his first 14 balls. It is conventional given the circumstances but not according to Pant. He charged down the track on his 15th ball, nevermind he was facing James Anderson who had bowling figures of 2/26 in 11 overs at that point. He jumped out and smashed him down the ground. 13 balls later, he caressed Stuart Broad through the covers.
With those two boundaries, he gained the approval of both the modern-day fans and the purists. England’s BazBall resurgence is arguably still in its trial period. Pant has turned himself into a stick of dynamite against the red-ball doing the same since his debut. Do you remember his first runs in Test cricket came with a six?
“He [Pant] reminds me of Sir Ian Botham who used to bat at six but was better than number five. Later he started batting at five,” said Harsha Bhogle on air while Pant was racing towards his hundred, hinting that the left-hander is good enough to permanently take that number for India.
This was probably Pant’s most sought-after hundred as yet. It was based on maximizing the output of every delivery on merit and gap finding, rather than simply smashing his way out of trouble. The gap finding was supreme. Some of his shots looked like an attempt to nudge the ball for a single but found the boundary ropes.
Add to that his favorite match-up of facing a finger spinner, Pant reached his hundred in only 89 balls, the fastest by an Indian wicketkeeper in Test cricket. The genius can be seen in his wagon wheel which carries a strike-rate of over 100 in nearly every part of the ground.
His acceleration after his hundred was the cherry on the cake. The last 46 in his 146 came off only 22 balls. He hammered 74 runs off 39 balls against the spinners - Jack Leach and Joe Root. Against pace, he garnered 72 off 72 balls.
The innings gave England a taste of their own medicine. Even with Daryl Mitchell-Tom Blundell partnerships, New Zealand didn’t retaliate like this. Pant did and the hosts were sent into disarray. Probably Stokes wondered at some point: “so this is what it feels like.”
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When Virender Sehwag told David Warner at the start of his career that he will be a great Test batter, the Australian left-hander reckoned that Sehwag was out of his mind. The prophecy was based on the available open spaces in the outfield.
This is what aids Pant in the longer format. The mishits are safe as long as you clear the in-field. However, the prominent aspect of this knock was that there were hardly any mishits this time. Almost all his boundaries were dealt with the middle of his bat.
The southpaw is yet to crack the code in white-ball cricket. But it is a robust format with a high chance of failure. It is also the expectations considering how well suited he is to the format, a kind of talent every team would yearn to possess. But while that doesn’t transpire, it is important not to lose sight of what he does in Test cricket.
Four of his five Test hundreds have come after walking in to bat at 58/4 in Cape Town, 80/4 in Ahmedabad, 121/5 at The Oval in England and 64/3 in this Test at Edgbaston. He pulls the team out of despair and rushes them to the safe house. And the way he does, it makes even Rahul Dravid pump his fists like a teenager.
