Guwahati: Rishabh Pant will always play like Rishabh Pant. Take it or leave it.
That is the common refrain of the Indian cricket’s ecosystem about the biggest match-winner in the contemporary Test team.
Pant’s game has always been a tightrope walk between heroism and insanity and often the lines do get blurred.
On Monday, when Pant charged down the track like a raging bull with an intention of depositing a Marco Jansen delivery from ‘Barsapara’ to ‘Kaziranga Forests”, his head coach Gautam Gambhir couldn’t be blamed if he had experienced a sense of deja vu.
The match situation warranted a bit of discretion from the Indian skipper and the shot wasn’t on. A few deliveries prior to that dismissal, Pant had tried a similar shot but was lucky to miss it.
One doesn’t know that whether he and the head coach had any meaningful conversation during the lunch break.
If one goes back to the Boxing Day Test in 2024, the two dismissals of Pant would only fuel the debate over his shot selection. Especially the second innings stroke when India were about two hours away from saving the fourth Test at the MCG. Against Travis Head’s part-time spin, Pant went for a slog sweep and posted the ball into hands of the fielder specially stationed for that particular shot.
Those in the corridors of power centre in the Indian team recollect that Gambhir back then was livid. Because at the tea break, the message was to bat normally and not take undue risks with just one session left in the game.
In the first innings of that match, a needless fallen hook shot found the third man and that prompted an agitated Sunil Gavaskar to shout “Stupid, Stupid, Stupid” on air.
But Pant, who is a minefield of talent and capable of doing stuff that others can’t even imagine, believed that “valour was a better part of discretion” and not the other way round as people might perceive it to be.
Now famous Gambhir’s verbal lashing to the whole team after that MCG Test is a part of the folklore but that did make Pant show his defensive wares on a far difficult track during the first innings at Sydney.
In the second innings of that game, he again became the signature Pant but with better choice of shots.
Cut to Guwahati, what would make Pant ponder over his choices is the additional responsibility that has been entrusted on him in the absence of Shubman Gill.
While fearlessness, natural game and backing one’s instincts are certainly the order of the day for the new age cricketers, old fashioned scrap when situation demands hasn’t yet gone out of fashion.
A good defence at times sets one up for the best offence and Pant would only do himself a world of good to know that. A high risk percentage game, on days when it doesn’t come off can make one look really silly like it happened with the skipper but everyone knows that he is better than that. If the captain doesn’t show the way in terms of reading the match situation, he will not exactly be in a position to advise a Dhruv Jurel or a Sai Sudharsan to be more discreet.
The start needs to come from him. On Monday, there was no Gavaskar to call on air but it wouldn’t be of any harm if Pant feels that someone might have admonished him for that stroke. He will have one more shot in this game where he can even try and win the game. Pant is fully capable of doing it. But for that he needs to accept that between win and lose, there is a respectable third option and
that is a draw.