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Keeper contest: Pant’s glitch and the return of Kishan
As it happens in sport, you see your contemporaries—people you shared rooms with—getting fast tracked into the national team, while you wait longingly for your turn.
Rishabh Pant and Ishan Kishan are contemporaries. I remember them being part of the India U19 team in the World Cup in Dhaka in 2016; Rahul Dravid was their coach. Pant and Kishan were the “alphas” in that team, Kishan more obviously so, being the captain.
Pant was flamboyant in the way he played his cricket while Kishan was more measured in his approach.
As it happens in sport, you see your contemporaries—people you shared rooms with—getting fast tracked into the national team, while you wait longingly for your turn.
Pant found himself in the national set up quickly but also got more attention than many others. He was not trying to get more close-ups on TV, he was just being himself. It was his batting that got him attention and success.
For some time now—nowhere has it been more apparent than at this IPL—that batting has been failing him.
For me, he has been one of the most fascinating subjects of study in Indian cricket. Even before he played for India, Pant was averaging close to 50 in first class cricket—that told me that he was not just a cameo specialist; he could put his head down and get the big scores too.
But it was his batting in the IPL that took the breath away.
Everyone hits sixes in the IPL but Pant was different. He was never balanced, like Hardik Pandya is, while sending the ball into the second tier. Neither was he firmly grounded like AB deVilliers, who can do all his genius stuff from that strong foundation with his feet on the ground. Pant seemed to only care about sending the ball over the ropes, he didn’t seem too concerned about the technique of it.
In commentary, I would get our cameras to focus on his front foot, which collapsed every time he attempted a big shot. Much to my amusement, his foot would collapse but the ball would invariably be on the roof. As commentators, we are often faced with players who challenge conventional wisdom and still make the game work for them. Pant was one such player. No firm grounding, no balance whatsoever, but a real commitment to the shot and an over usage of the torso to get the distance on the ball. Remember the word “commitment” here, I will come to it in a while.
When he made his Test debut in 2017, I got some more insight into the player. In his debut innings, I was floored by the technique Pant showed against Anderson and Broad; especially one spell from Broad where Pant was leaving the ball beautifully and, when required, defending very close to his body. He batted for an hour and 12 minutes for his 24. It was the perfect Test innings in tough conditions.
Here was this wonderful calm side of the maverick Pant from the IPL, his technique nothing like how it is when he is facing the white ball. I realized why his first class record is so impressive.
He got 24 and 6 in that Test. The young man probably felt that he had failed on his debut because the next innings was a strange one where he met everything with a dead bat and eventually departed for zero after spending 45 minutes at the crease. This was a man with a strike rate of 160 in T20s trying to play the quintessential defensive Test innings to succeed and failing at it.
Next innings, he tried to play the IPL way, scoring 18 off 12 balls and got out to Moeen Ali running down the wicket, trying to play a big shot. He had gone from 0 off 24, to 18 off 12 balls in the same Test; my antenna was up, I thought, this is not a good sign, Pant is obviously confused now.
He has remained that way ever since that second Test of his career in England. Yes, he got a 100 in England and one in Australia after that, but not in the matches that mattered.
There’s no doubting the X factor he has. It comes sporadically into play. But now it seems a glitch has entered his system. His software is not as clean as before, the commitment that I mentioned earlier, when he was able to send the ball on the rooftop of Kotla despite being badly unbalanced, was not the same.
Because he defies the technical principles of batting, he needs his mind to be very strong to succeed. If the mind has doubts, it becomes a struggle for Pant, and that’s what we are seeing now. His absence from India’s white ball squads is a massive setback; just a few months back, he was a “star”.
Meanwhile, his once U19 captain Kishan has taken the staircase up to the spotlight. He has slowly developed his T20 game, as is apparent in the superb season he is having for Mumbai Indians. There is a bit of Pant in the way he is playing his big shots this season, in the way he puts his powerful torso to work. He can hit quality fast bowlers out of the ground too and seems to have acquired more gears to his batting than Pant does. He will now start competing with his junior cricket colleague for the same spot in the Indian team. This will be an intriguing contest within a contest in Indian cricket.
