India Batting Coach Explains Why Pant Dislikes Getting Instructions While Batting

Rishabh Pant had a season to forget with the bat in IPL 2025 — minus the ton in LSG’s last league game against RCB — but more than his IPL returns, many were worried whether the poor form would carry into the England Tests.

However, so far in England, Pant has been batting like a man possessed, with 342 runs at an average of 85.50. Much of Pant’s success in this series has come due to his bravery, with the wicketkeeper batter doing ‘Rishabh Pant’ things to put the England bowlers off and dominate proceedings.

The team management, led by Gautam Gambhir, have refrained from giving Pant any advice while batting, and batting coach Sitanshu Kotak explained the reason behind the same.

"Rishabh actually talks a lot about what he does, when he does [it], why he does [it]. To me, he's spoken, but he's someone who doesn't like talking too much during his innings because he feels that that changes his mindset, and he takes the wrong decision. That's only when he's batting,” Kotak said, reported ESPNCricinfo.

"Apart from that, he talks about other batters also, about himself also, and he does [properly plan] what he wants to do because it's not so easy to score Test hundreds or not so easy to be successful at this level without having any planning."

The pitch for the third Test at Lord’s is expected to be a very spicy one, and that could bring about low scores like we saw in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. There, many batters felt the need to take undue risks on spicy surfaces since there was always a ‘ball with their name on it’, but Kotak asserted that such a mindset should never be encouraged.

"If a batter thinks there is a lot of movement in the pitch, and if there is [half] an opportunity I have to score boundaries because there is a good ball coming [anyway], that is a bad mindset for red-ball cricket," Kotak said. 

"Anyway, they possess so much skill because of white-ball cricket that they can convert anything in the slot into fours and sixes. They don't have to really think that I want to hit a boundary."

Kotak, a domestic veteran of 130 first-class matches, further explained why aggression should never be equated to hitting boundaries. So far in this series, India have scored at 4.3 runs per over, almost at the same rate as England (4.5 RPO).

"We [India] have batted well in both the matches. I feel we have such skilful batters [who] can score at four an over without going searching for runs. What else is aggressive batting? We are scoring 360 in 90 overs. But our mindset now is to not go looking for boundaries,” he said.