- Rishabh Pant is a unique, unpredictable talent and few bat at his tempo
- He charges down the pitch, slogs and blocks and talks to himself all the time
- England could have been more aggressive early in his second innings
Rishabh Pant is a virtually unique player to deal with as an opposition captain. Not many bat like him in Test cricket.
Yes, there have been dynamic players such as Chris Gayle or AB de Villiers — those who go at opponents and hit the ball to all sorts of different areas.
But there have not been many who bat at the same tempo as Pant, and I don’t mean strike rate when I say tempo.
Others have scored at 84 runs per 100 balls in Test innings, but it’s the way Pant goes about it that makes him different.
Second ball in both innings here, he has charged down the pitch, trying to hit the bowler out of the ground. One went straight back over Ben Stokes’s head, the other, off Chris Woakes, flew over the slips for four.
Then he goes through periods of five, six, seven overs when he doesn’t do anything and defends half volleys. Then he will go again, once he has had a word with himself.
There is method to his madness, but only he knows what it is, whether he is going to defend or attack, and because of that unique nature, I can see why it leads to opposition captains thinking outside the box.
Things were fairly normal to start with on Monday, but then when Pant started charging, hitting the ball to various places in the deep. Stokes seemed to think: here’s a lad who could get himself out. He was either blocking or slogging, so the calculation was that putting men in the deep would result in a chance being created.
That does two things: it maybe stops the huge shots being played but it also gives the opportunity to take singles.
What I didn’t like was the phase early in Pant’s innings, when he was cross with himself, and England allowed him to knock the ball into a gap and walk down the other end.
It’s an odd thing to say about a player who has scored as many runs as Pant, but that’s when you want to keep him on strike, because that is the best time to get him out.
A team can take advantage when he’s getting frustrated with himself, because after four or five dots, he might try to do something stupid. Instead, he was calming down at the non-striker’s end.
He must be an incredibly difficult bloke to coach because, as Sunil Gavaskar alluded to with his ‘stupid, stupid, stupid’ comment in Australia last winter, Pant will do things that absolutely wind you up, but he will also get hundreds — as he has done twice here.
India’s other second-innings centurion, KL Rahul, batted at the same tempo throughout the day, but Stokes’s tactics were motivated by Pant’s idiosyncrasies.
He removed his slips and put fielders back. It was one of the few times that I have seen Stokes go defensive. As I say, he did so because he clearly felt that he was more likely to get Pant caught in the deep.
Even with Pant playing like he is, though, Headingley remains a caught-behind-the-wicket place — about 50 per cent of catches here are taken in the cordon.
Think of the number that have been held and dropped between the wicketkeeper and gully in this match. In Leeds, you have to keep your catchers in, so I was very surprised that Stokes had no slip fielders.
Sod’s law then that Pant nicked one for four where first slip would have been standing. Then, after Stokes had put a man there, Pant nicked one through the vacant second-slip area.
What Stokes could have done, as he often has — especially when captaining spin in Asia — was set in-out fields. That would have provided him with men round the bat — prime real estate for Test cricket in Leeds — but also fielders in the deep.
It wasn’t as if he went defensive all day — he kept the slips in to Rahul. But as a captain, he has always told his bowlers that first and foremost they should be thinking about how to get wickets.
This was the first time I can recall him moving away from his modus operandi of trying to dismiss an opponent.
