Jansen wonders what if Pant found his groove, praises track

Guwahati: Rishabh Pant is getting a lot of flak for his poor shot selection against Marco Jansen but the South African wrecker-in-chief reckons had the flamboyant keeper got his execution right, the “conversations might have been different”.

Pant gave Jansen the charge when India were reeling at 102 for 4. The tall bowler had kept it short of length and the ball climbed on Pant, taking the edge into the keeper’s gloves.

Asked if he was surprised with Pant’s selection of shot, Jansen replied: “It’s not that things will always be going your way.”

“So there are times where Rishabh Pant would have hit that one fifty rows back, straight back over my head and then we would be having a different conversation,” Jansen was practical about winning the battle of execution,” he told media after the end of day’s play.

Jansen had realised early into the Indian first innings that neither there was nip in the air nor off the surface movement, forcing him to try out bouncers which worked well for him on the third day. Having taken South Africa close to 500 (489) with a superb 93 off 91 balls on day two, Jansen did the star turn with the ball too, by grabbing 6 for 48 in India’s paltry first innings score of 201.

Out of his six victims, barring Kuldeep Yadav, other five were out to short balls and he showed the Indian attack what plan B meant on an unhelpful track. “To be honest, the ball wasn’t nipping as much like in Kolkata so we had to figure out a plan. When I got my first wicket (Dhruv Jurel) with a bouncer, we said, ‘okay cool, let’s see how long this is going to work for’ and yeah, it just came off,” Jansen said.

While Kuldeep Yadav had termed the Barsapara track as a “road”, Jansen gave a divergent view calling it a “sporting one”.

“It’s a good wicket to bat on. There’s good pace, good bounce if you play the short ball well, you’ll score runs and if you bowl well, you’ll get wickets.”

However once the ball had gone soft, he didn’t come into the attack and only got his last two wickets when the second new ball was taken. “After that spell of mine, it felt like the ball was a bit softer. It wasn’t getting up and it didn’t have that zip if it makes sense and then as soon as we took the new ball, the bounce was still there but because it was a new ball it was getting on quite nicely so we tried and use that to

our advantage.” agencies