The denouement of a 149-minute episode (innings) was a tad unsatisfying. Rishabh Pant tried to pull a Scott Boland delivery that was a touch short. On a normal pitch, the shot was on. On a spicy SCG surface, the delivery hurried the batsman and took the toe-end of the bat to Pat Cummins at mid-on. On the face of it, the left-hand batter was done in by another wrong choice of shot. But it is important to judge things in the right context.
Yes, the dismissal was down to an error of judgment, as Pant picked the wrong length to play the shot. His eyes lit up at half-a-chance to break the stranglehold. Boland forced the error and deserved credit.
Boland’s bowling, the discipline he showed and the way he relentlessly probed the batsmen, would have made even Glenn McGrath, the man behind the Pink Test, proud. In fact, collectively the Australian bowling was so good that it gave hardly any breathing space to the opponents. The ball was seaming around all day. Such was the control from the Australian bowlers that India could hit only four boundaries in the first 39 overs. From a batting point of view, the conditions and the degree of difficulty demanded top application. Pant showed it.
He took blows, writhed in pain, curbed his natural instincts and gritted it out. During his 98-ball stay at the crease, Pant showed he was a good student of the game, willing to learn from his mistakes. The hara-kiri he committed at the MCG took him to the verge of being dropped for the final Test. A talking-to was needed, and he duly got it from Gautam Gambhir, the head coach. The 27-year-old displayed a marked improvement.
Runs were at a premium on the first day of the final Test in Sydney. The Indian batsmen showed the stomach for a fight, but a claustrophobic dressing-room atmosphere ostensibly played a part in them going into a shell. It felt like the batsmen were playing with a fear of failure. Rohit Sharma’s omission was seismic. The entire charade around it affected the dressing room. Out there in the middle, the batsmen even looked uncertain about rotating the strike.
For the Latest Sports News: Click Here
Pant, although subdued by his gung-ho standards, tried to release the pressure. He stepped out a couple of times to counter-attack. Also, he was one player who looked keen on taking the singles. Overall, until the point he got out, he batted sensibly.
“I think in this innings, I was not in a frame of mind where I wanted to take charge of the game because the wicket was doing too much,” Pant said at the post-day press conference. “And the kind of situation we were in and while playing inside I felt like I could play a little bit of defensive cricket. Yes, there’s a time to attack but when (to do it), you have to feel that from inside.”
Rohit is gone. Virat Kohli’s glorious career has entered the twilight zone. Pant, along with Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill, is the future of India’s batting. He is a happy-go-lucky character, someone who could sport a smile even while doing rehab after a life-threatening car accident. And in the grand scheme of things, the learnings from the ongoing series would help him become a better cricketer.
Until this Australia tour, his natural talent had made things easy, irrespective of the opponents, conditions and situations. This is the first series where Pant has suffered serious reverses – just 194 runs in eight innings at an average of 24.25. “In cricket, you fail a lot more than you succeed,” Rahul Dravid told WV Raman on the latter’s Inside Out podcast a few years ago. “In batting, in general, you fail a lot more. If you consider a fifty as a success point, you don’t cross fifty in the majority of your innings. So, you do learn to fail a lot in cricket.”
Going ahead, the ongoing Border-Gavaskar Trophy, where Pant has been learning to bat differently, could be a major signpost in his career.
Also Read: India’s Batting Failures: A Crisis of Strategy, Execution, or Both?