After yet another truly intoxicating dose of Rishabh Pant in Test cricket, Rohit Sankar details his incredible numbers in Test cricket and wonders just how good Pant can get to from here.
Rishabh Pant made the bowlers dance to his tunes and then, after a shot that you just can’t really wrap your head around, was seen sulking in the dressing room as the cameras zoomed in on him, sitting near his captain, still shaking his head for missing out on a big one. This could be any of Pant’s five Test knocks that came to agonising ends in the nineties. They all have the same doleful ending.
Exhilaration, daze, misery, and brooding over it all again. That’s how psychoactive substances work. Rishabh Pant works along similar lines, even on a drab Friday evening with the last session of day one of a sub-continent Test meandering along, gently cajoling you to sleep.
While most of the day was all about Rohit Sharma’s first Test as captain and Virat Kohli’s 100th as a player, the dismissals of the two big guns turned the focus on how India’s middle-order would fare against an increasingly threatening Lasith Embuldeniya. Only three months back another left-arm spinner had left a strong impression on India’s batters with his traditional strengths. Embuldeniya is as good, if not better than Ajaz Patel and after turning one past Kohli, who was batting like a dream, the left-arm spinner appeared to have found the perfect spot to trouble batters on this wicket.
That was until Rishabh Pant calmly milked him and his mates around for a fine fifty before breaking loose with a stunning assault on anything and everything that came his way. From 50 off 72 balls, Pant blitzed his way to 46 runs off the next 25 balls.
For all of his showmanship, Pant never really reached the coveted landmark cricket is obsessed with: a hundred. Pant has four Test hundreds, each in different continents. He averages over 40 in Tests now with five dismissals in the nineties.
Even if he had converted just one of those five into a hundred, Pant would have matched Babar Azam’s tally of Test hundreds, having played fewer Tests than the Pakistani captain.
18 wicketkeeper batters have scored four or more Test hundreds when playing as the side’s designated wicketkeeper. Only four of them, namely AB de Villiers, Andy Flower, Adam Gilchrist and Les Ames have a higher batting average than Pant. Since his Test debut in 2018, no keeper has scored more Test hundreds.
An extraordinary start to his Test career draws instant questions about where he stands when compared to the other great behind the stumps for India, MS Dhoni. After 29 Tests, Dhoni averaged 33.76 in Test cricket. Pant averages 40.68 after as many games. He has hundreds in England, Australia, and South Africa, something no other Indian wicketkeeper has done. He is already just two tons behind Dhoni’s final career haul.
Rishabh Pant is already India’s greatest Test wicketkeeper and I’m not sure it’s even that close#INDvSL
— Ben Gardner (@Ben_Wisden) March 4, 2022
There’s really no arguing that Pant is India’s greatest-ever Test wicketkeeper batter already. The century counts don’t really make a difference to that. Not for him, at least, whose nonchalance in the nineties often paves way for unfair criticism on his lack of hunger and determination to get to the three-figure mark, which really is just another number.
It’s scary to think about how good Pant could become. This unbridled version of himself is truly capable of destruction as we have seen in the last couple of years. Four Test tons in four continents, five other scores in the nineties, and his greatest knock so far in Tests is outside these nine extraordinary innings. At 24, he is still raw, still learning, still developing. If these 29 Tests are any indication of what Pant’s future is when he finds how to control his innings better, then we have a one-of-a-kind special someone in the making in Test cricket.
