Rishabh Pant sings redemption song with exemplary display of courage in Sydney

Since being dismissed for a terribly ill-advised scoop in the first innings of the Melbourne Test a week back, Rishabh Pant has made 70 runs from 202 deliveries, with five fours and one six, in his last two knocks. His career Test strike-rate is 73.50; these two knocks combined have seen him score at 34.65 runs per 100 deliveries faced.

How much of it is due to the criticism he endured in the wake of that scoop off Scott Boland that flew off the leading edge to third-man at the MCG is open to question. Certainly, even without the castigation that shot rightly attracted from the outside , Pant must have realised that given the match situation and the field, he should have refrained from going with his natural instincts. It might have been less Pant, but less Pant is better than no Pant.

A chastened Pant did his level best to curb his normal attacking style in the second innings of the previous Test, when a target of 340 in 92 overs on the final day was definitely out of reach of India. For more than two hours, with Yashasvi Jaiswal for stubborn company, he offered a defensive blade to most balls. Thirty off 104, with two fours, wasn’t typically Pant, but it showcased a side to his batting seldom witnessed previously. This wasn’t just Pant growing up, but growing up fast, too.

It was still an avoidable risky stroke that brought about his downfall after all the hard yards had been put in. Travis Head was brought on so Australia could catch up with the over-rate, and he operated with a long-on in place. When he saw a long-hop, Pant’s eyes lit up but the extra bounce defeated his three-fourth-hearted pull and brought the long-on fielder into play. By itself, it was a poor stroke; that it precipitated a collapse of seven for 34 that cost India the game when only 77 deliveries remained to safety meant that for all the against-the-grain endeavour, Pant was again painted as the villain of the piece.

The 27-year-old attempted to sing the redemption song at the Sydney Cricket Ground on a Friday he is unlikely to forget in a hurry. In an exemplary display of courage, he suffered as many as eight horrible blows to various parts of his body, but while his body ached badly – by his own admission – by the close of his play, his spirit remained unbroken. Battered and bruised, he dug deep to put physical discomfort out of the way on a surface that kept encouraging seam, where the bounce was sometimes alarming off a length which, coupled with the lateral movement, made batting fairly hazardous.

Among the various blows were one to his left bicep, just below a nasty bruise he had received on the same part of his body in the previous game, and a crunching smack to his helmet, both against Mitchell Starc and both of which necessitated extended treatment from the physio. Not long afterwards, he was struck smack behind his right shoulder and on his box from successive deliveries from Pat Cummins. This was in addition to several other hits to his thigh, the most painful of which was a ping on the left inner thigh from Scott Boland.

A different Pant, a more restrained and subdued version

Pant’s response to even one of these incidents could have been a charge down the track to get one back on the bowler immediately, but this was a different Pant, a more restrained and subdued version, a greater exemplar of setting his ego and one-upmanship aside and sticking to the game plan he had formulated in his mind. “In this innings, I wasn’t in the frame of mind where I felt I could take charge of the game, looking at the nature of the wicket,” he explained, as he reflected on his last two outings to the batting crease and the approach he has embraced therein.

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“It’s a little bit difficult, but not very difficult, I would say,” he remarked of having to bat well within himself. “The initial part could be very difficult when you see a ball which you can hit, but sometimes, you have to play sensible cricket, secure cricket, especially the way the wicket was behaving. That was the idea behind the way I was playing. The last match, the kind of target we had, I had to play that way (defensively). I am pretty fine with the way I’m playing.”

So are India when these are the batting conditions they are presented with, but in less demanding circumstances, Pant himself would want to revert to type, to take the fight to the opposition. With nearly eight years of international cricket under his belt, he is experienced enough to figure things out. He has the pedigree and the performances to suggest that he is no one-trick pony or one-innings wonder, and now that he is slowly getting to terms with situational awareness and how to put the body on the line without allowing physical injury to impact his mind or his approach, he will be a more rounded, more complete batter who can be relied upon in a crisis.

Pant’s USP will remain his unorthodoxy, his ability to do the kind of special things mere mortals can’t even dream about. He will still make mistakes and sometimes embarrass himself in the manner in which he gets out, but on the risk vs reward scales, that is acceptable if the percentages are in his favour. It’s when he plays with scant regard to the situation of the match and the position his team is in that the maverick in him can exasperate and infuriate in equal parts.

Learning to enjoy batting in a different way

The learning process is usually an arduous and unforgiving one, especially when it happens in a Test match, but Pant will be richer for the experience of the last two Tests. He has shown himself to be ready to embrace newer challenges, to learn to enjoy batting in a different way from his natural style if that’s the need of the hour. Very soon, he will form the experienced core group alongside KL Rahul and potentially Shubman Gill, and it will be incumbent upon this trio to carry the younger batters, the likes of Yashasvi Jaiswal, Washington Sundar and Nitish Kumar Reddy, among others, along with them.

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The signs are promising, especially from the Pant standpoint. This hasn’t been a tour of too many positives for India, but if it sparks the making of a more aware, resilient and uncompromising Rishabh Pant, the future will be less tense than the present.