The Battle of Rishabh Pant
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Rishabh Pant was hit. Not once or twice, but almost 10 to 12 times. He was hit on both hips, the inner thigh, the middle thigh, the arm, the helmet, and the shoulder—kind of everywhere. He was absolutely and utterly under attack. That was in the first innings at the SCG.
In the second, though, Rishabh Pant was hitting. He would charge down the wicket and smash the ball back over the head. He would slash to the off side, ramp the ball over the top, and just slog sweep fast bowlers for fun.
This Test match might be the ultimate battle over Rishabh Pant. How he should play, how he should act, whether he's following the right instructions, listening to the right voices. It feels like for almost every Rishabh Pant, there's a moral war being waged. In this particular Test match, it felt like a real war that he had to survive.
At first he was hit, and then he hit. That is the Battle of Rishabh Pant.
There was a moment in the first innings when Rishabh Pant, after blocking, playing and missing, and getting hit on the pad quite a bit, decided to run down the wicket at Pat Cummins and hit the ball back down the ground with a flat bat. We've seen him play that shot so many times before. But when he came down, he hit the ball straight into the pitch and had no idea where it was going.
Suddenly, he had to dart back into his crease to make sure that it wasn't going to spin back onto his stumps. And, metaphorically, he did a very similar thing. After that attacking shot, he played one or two others. But realistically, he retreated back into his own batting style, and decided to be defensive.
The question you had to have after that was: how much of this was just that the pitch was really tough to bat on because the pitch was really tough to bat on? And how much of this was Gautam Gambhir telling him to play to the conditions a little more. Also, how much was it the external noise—Sunil Gavaskar and everyone else on social media—telling him that he should play this way?
It feels like, in Rishabh Pant's batting, we have this almost pure attacking genius, yet everyone is always attaching their own fears and hopes to him, trying to mould him into something else, not letting him just be the player he is meant to be.
The most likely explanation was that there was no other way to play on the first day. The wicket had sideways movement, it was up and down, and the ball wasn't coming on. And so, Rishabh Pant just decided that he had tried to smash the ball, it hadn’t worked, he tried to hit the ball and could barely do that, so he would just stay in there for as long as possible
But when Rishabh Pant plays anything other than attacking cricket, we start to wonder if the voices have an issue in this. And let's be honest, over the last couple of Tests, the voices have been about as loud about him as they ever have been.
This was a man who was trying to draw a Test match and perhaps still thought about winning it too at the MCG in the second innings. While trying to do that, he got a half-tracker from Travis Head and hit it to one of the longest boundaries in recorded cricket history and was caught. on it.
If he was still going for the win in his mind, this was a ball that definitely was there to be hit, maybe not particularly to that boundary, or in the air. If he was playing to draw, it was one of the odder ways to be dismissed while playing for a draw that you'll see.
Of course, it came on the back of the first innings, where Australia set up the field with a specific trap in mind. If he was going to slog across the line when coming down the wicket, they had a deep third, and if he was going to try the ramps, there was also an opportunity for that fielder to be involved twice. Yet, when he was batting quite well, towards the end of a Scott Boland spell, he decided to try that shot and hit the ball directly into the trap.
That was the shot that upset Sunil Gavaskar so much that he said Rishabh Pant shouldn't come back to the change room. But we've seen him play that shot again and again and again. We've seen him take all sorts of risks—sweeping fast bowlers, taking on three, four, even five fielders on the boundary against spinners.
