Kolkata: The surprise element in Rishabh Pant’s batting is long gone, but how he still manages to leave the opposition gobsmacked will probably end up as a research thesis one day. Ben Stokes probably felt he had seen everything and so when Pant skipped down the pitch to smack him over his head for four on Friday, he burst out laughing.
Pant was straight-faced though. Stokes followed it up with some friendly banter but Pant remained unresponsive, focused on gardening his end of the pitch. This was unprecedented. The England skipper would have straightaway known it wasn’t a good sign that Pant wasn’t joining in on the banter.
This was Pant’s seventh hundred in Test cricket, going past MS Dhoni’s India record of six for a wicketkeeper. Three of these hundreds have come in England, staggering given that no other visiting wicketkeeper has more than one hundred there. And a number that makes us think again about Pant’s potential, performance and destiny.
There is a version of Pant we all love — behind-the-stumps chatterbox, Spiderman theme song hummer, happy-go-lucky entertainer. And then there is the struggling IPL leader trying to break back into the ODI team, fighting a growing narrative that he isn’t meant to play all formats. The jury is still out on that.
In Tests though, Pant is a species by himself. So, when he walked out at Headingley on Friday, it seemed he was due a big release. The stage was set with India on 221/3 meaning Pant had the licence to find his feet. For 46 balls after that four, however, Pant hadn’t hit another boundary.
Not all intentionally though. The struggle was sometimes real, Stokes varying the pace on the ball, Shoaib Bashir tempting him with the lengths Pant usually deposits in the upper tiers. But Pant was working on keeping the ball down, letting the ball go, doing everything he isn’t known to do. Or maybe that’s the image he has built to deceive. Not so long back, at Edgbaston Pant was dour at the start but still finished with a 111-ball 146. So, England can’t say they were caught off-guard.
Chris Woakes nearly got him, a banana swing into Pant that he shouldered arms to and almost got bowled. It seemed like a premeditated leave too, considering Pant had tried to run down Woakes through slips only the previous delivery. But with Pant, you come to accept such arrangements. Amid the humdrum of the technical aspect of playing the ball late in England, Pant has his own set of rules that India have learnt not to tinker with. The upside of such an outlook is an innings like this – (134 – 178b, 12×4, 6×6).
To take out Bashir on Friday was the first line of attack for Pant. Paddling him to fine-leg, clobbering him over the sight screen, Pant was so ruthless that it forced England to take the new ball as soon as it was available. The shot that got Pant to fifty was ugly but he wouldn’t have cared as long as the runs were coming. To continue in the same vein on Saturday was possible partly because Shubman Gill (147) was a pillar at the other end, and largely because England weren’t bowling to a plan.
Pant used that to his advantage. Brydon Carse banged it short, prompting Pant to get inside the line of the ball and help himself to an easy four. When he bowled length, Pant just stayed back and guided the ball through gully for four. More than the risk of getting hammered by Pant, it was the unpredictability of it that seemed to toy with England’s psyche. He isn’t methodical, but always unshackled. He went for a full hoick and missed, the bat flying out of his hand. And in the melee, England wicket-keeper Jamie Smith missed the easiest of chances. Bashir was pummelled the same way till Pant pulled off a one-handed six to reach his hundred. Stokes wasn’t laughing anymore.
