DECODED
Follow UsWhen it comes to life, in most cases, the idea of something tends to be better than the actual reality.
The thought of spending the weekend doing nothing but chilling and resting is a comforting one. But three hours into the ‘recharging’ session, you will find yourself restless and bored to death, loathing yourself for being such a sloth.
The idea of getting sloshed is a very enticing one. But regret will hit you instantly the moment you realize you’ve had one drink too many. Suddenly, you’re now having to mentally prepare yourself to spend the rest of the night visiting the washroom every two minutes.
Likewise, sometimes it feels that the idea of Rishabh Pant being a mainstay in India’s T20I side is better than the actual reality. In our heads, Pant is this monster that brutalizes attacks, puts the fear of god into opposition captains and is the guy that makes the difference in the middle-order. He is a superhuman that simply belongs in the starting XI.
But a sample-size worth 42 innings tells us that this is simply not true. It tells us that he, if anything, has been a serial underperformer who’s been incredibly lucky to still be an integral part of the side.
For over three years, Pant the T20I cricketer has been a divisive figure — today, we try to make sense of an international T20 career that’s continued to defy logic.
A career that has refused to take off
“When you’re asking people to play a slightly more attacking brand of cricket in the middle overs and to take the game on a little bit more, sometimes it’s hard to judge based on two or three games.”
This was the head coach of team India, Rahul Dravid, talking about Pant in the aftermath of the southpaw’s nightmare South Africa series in which he averaged 14.50.
Now, Dravid is partially right. Batting at No.4 and No.5 is right up there as the toughest job there is in T20 cricket, and no one should be judged or written off on the basis of a handful of games.
The problem with Pant is that it’s not two or three games. Or five. Or Ten. It’s 42 games spread across 5 years.
In T20I history, 72 cricketers have batted in the Top 5 at least as many times as Pant has (41). Among them, only 15 have registered a lower batting average than the southpaw’s 23.00. Removing Ireland, Afghanistan and Bangladesh from the list (also the other non-top 10 sides), only Dinesh Chandimal (19.43), Andre Fletcher (21.11) and Fakhar Zaman (22.4) have averaged lower than Pant.
In terms of Indian players, Ajinkya Rahane (20.83) is the only batter who has boasted a lower average than Pant.
Perhaps it’s not right to judge a player like Pant based on average. Fair enough, after all, his whole gimmick is that he’s a dasher that either goes boom or bust.
Even if we are to merely look at strike rate, however, he is 46th out of 72 batters who have batted 40 or more times in T20I cricket. Pant’s SR of 123 is not what you would associate with an enforcer, and in his T20I career, there have been six different instances of the wicket-keeper batter registering a SR of 100 or lower having batted more than 15 balls.
It’s not that he’s not had a continuous run. Since the start of 2019, no Indian player has played as many T20Is as Pant (38). And as much as the Kohli-Shastri detractors would love to tell the world that Pant was treated unfairly in the previous regime, he was not. While it is true that he was dropped for the away games against New Zealand and Australia, Pant, under Kohli, still played the third-most games among all Indian players. He was also not ‘moved around’, nearly 82% of his innings coming at either No.4 or No.5, and his role in the side was pretty much the same as what it is now.
Indeed, it is normal for talented players to have a rough start to their careers. History will tell us that a plethora of great players took significant time to find their feet. Not just in cricket, but across sport. But all of them eventually encountered turning points or watershed moments that enabled them to move to the next level.
Perhaps Pant will too, some day, but it’s been four years since he’s started playing T20Is regularly. He’s had his fair share of ‘good’ knocks but that’s about it. To this very date, he’s struggled to stamp his authority.
It is not unfair, then, to wonder whether the turnaround in fortune will ever happen.
When it comes to Pant, are we still stuck in the past?
When discussing Pant and T20 cricket, his IPL exploits inevitably tend to be brought up as proof for the fact that he’s one of the best T20 players in the world.
But here’s the thing: even his IPL numbers suggest that he’s no longer the player he was four years ago. They suggest that Pant, if anything, has relatively declined as a T20 batter post 2019.
In his first 4 IPL seasons, the left-hander was an absolute dynamite, averaging 36.17 while striking at 162.7. He peaked in IPL 2018, scoring nearly 700 runs at an astounding strike rate of 173.60.
Of course, there was no way he could have realistically maintained those numbers. But since then he’s been striking at under 130, with his six-hitting frequency dropping significantly.
To be fair to Pant, his numbers took a beating owing to him enduring two stinkers of seasons across IPL 2020 and 2021, where he took up ‘anchoring’, shying away from his usual role of being a dasher. He was aberrantly bad across those two years: overall he struck at 121.5, while his strike rate versus spin in those two seasons was 107.3.
In IPL 2022 he eschewed anchoring and immediately, his strike rate shot up back to 150.
But a glance at a few key metrics — such as his proficiency in the middle-overs and his performance versus pace — tell us that even in IPL 2022, the southpaw was nowhere near his best.
It seems, then, that when it comes to Pant and T20 cricket, the world is still stuck in the past. The bottom line is that for three seasons now, he’s been a serial underperformer in the IPL too.
Why has Pant been unable to replicate his Test success in T20Is?
One of the biggest mysteries in world cricket is Pant’s inability to replicate the hitting prowess he showcases in Tests in the shortest format.
You’ve got to ask the question: how can someone that can effortlessly manhandle bowling attacks in Tests, struggle to do the same in T20Is, supposedly the ‘easier’ of two formats?
Frankly, any explanation is a bit of a stretch. Because it simply doesn’t make sense. Not when you watch him bat in the whites.
Still, there is nothing wrong in trying to make sense of this oddity.
One possible explanation could be that in Tests, he’s a beneficiary of the way the fields are set-up: aggressive fields leave a lot of open spaces for him to exploit. This is important because we know Pant is not the cleanest of hitters. What these open spaces do is give him a big margin for error. Well and good if he connects and the ball goes for six, but even if he doesn’t, he’s going to collect a boundary or a couple. He does not have the same freedom in the shortest format, where the fields are set-up defensively.
In Tests, Pant also gets to dictate the pace of the game: the bowling side plays to his tempo and not vice-versa. This is not the case in T20Is, where the match situation dictates how he needs to be playing. Perhaps this plays a big part in his struggles in the shortest format. This could very well be true, given Pant has now seemed to crack the code in ODIs, where batters, barring the odd occasion, have the freedom to dictate the pace of the game due to it being a 50-over affair.
In T20s, bowlers can also religiously adhere to certain plans and force a mistake out of batters, who often have no time on their hands. Since IPL 2022, for instance, teams have had enormous success deploying an extremely wide-line while bowling to Pant. In the recently concluded South Africa series, in fact, the Proteas managed to catch the left-hander using the ‘wide’ trap not once, not twice, but four times.
Say had Pant encountered a similar ploy in Test cricket, he might have either bided his time — by leaving the wide deliveries — or merely taken a low-risk option. Or, he might very well have targeted some of the open spaces in the field. Absence of this particular luxury could very well be unsettling him in T20 cricket.
The left-hander, in T20 cricket of late, also seems to be muddled whenever he walks out to bat, unsure about his approach, oscillating between two extremes.
But all things considered, it is still bizarre that there is such a disparity between Pant the Test cricketer and Pant the T20I cricketer. Because this was a guy who, mind you, only 4 years ago was the best Indian batter in the IPL. That he’s failed to crack the T20I code and that he’s significantly declined as a T20 batter is, in many ways, hard to believe.
Why the management are not giving up on Pant
Despite there being plenty of clamoring for Rishabh Pant to be dropped from T20s, the Rahul Dravid-led management, in no uncertain terms, have stated that they see the 24-year-old as an integral part of the side.
Not because of what he is now, but because of what he could potentially become.
He is a young, left-handed, wicket-keeper batter who specializes in taking down spin and has the potential to be an absolute force of nature in the middle-overs. Not to forget, he is also a promising leadership candidate. He simply ticks far too many boxes.
So while currently, the idea of Rishabh Pant being a mainstay in India’s T20I side might be better than the actual reality, there might arrive a day where the reality is as good as the idea itself.
Till then, however, questions will be raised endlessly about Pant’s position in the T20I side.
