The Rise Of Rishabh Pant

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You are one of the greatest bowlers of all time with over 800 international wickets, you run in, bowl a decent good length delivery and see a young lad, on the strike, reverse sweeping you over the slip cordon for a four. Wouldn't you feel being humiliated? Wouldn't you feel being harassed? Well, by this time you would have obviously guessed that I am talking of James Anderson being bullied by Rishabh Pant. Of course this is not the first and the last time we saw Rishabh Pant bullying a bowler with his unique unorthodox shots. He has been in this business for quite some years now.

It's a journey of a 12 year old kid from Roorkee who would travel to Delhi with his mother for his cricket training. The same kid, now 23, is making the bowlers travel all over the park with his 360 degrees shots. In a short career of 4 years he has already become the only Indian keeper batsman to smash test hundreds in Australia and England. In addition to it, he has also played many magnificent knocks in the IPL as well whether it be his century against the SRH or his blitz against the MI where he wreaked havoc on the side with his innings of 78 off 23 deliveries.

From being dropped from the national side, to being the team's first choice keeper in all formats, it has been a great learning curve for the Indian batsman. He was many a times slammed for his immature shot selection and lack of temperament, whether it be from the cricket experts or the social media. He has naturally been a hard striker of the ball and that's his game. He likes playing aggressive cricket and obviously if you live by the sword, you die by it. 

All this doesn't mean that he never had the right temperament, after all he has got a triple century registered to his name at the first class level and has tasted success in test cricket as well. But he has had a tough time in the limited overs circuit for the Indian side. Being constantly in and out of the team, he always had the insecurity of his place in the playing XI. There's always a buzz around whenever he comes out to bat. Undeniably, the sort of exciting batsman he is, he would always keep you on the edge of your seat throughout his stay at the crease. But the point here is that the insecurity and diffidence were very well evident in his body language. Probably them combined and the hype around his batting played a part in his dipping confidence.

The real issue with him, as mentioned earlier, has been his shot selection and also his running between the wickets. We have often seen the southpaw struggling to rotate the strike and being unable to convert ones into twos and twos into threes. The reason this affects a batsman's game is that on a day when you are not connecting the ball well, you need to keep the scoreboard ticking by picking up constant ones and twos and later cover up for the run rate after you get into rhythm. This is the foreseeable reason why we saw Rishabh struggling. On a bad day when he was unable to rotate the strike well early in his innings, he got out playing a rash shot instead of nudging it around for a while before he gets his eye in.

The apparent change for him is that with time he has developed a better understanding of his game. Being a natural striker of the ball, he had a tendency to hit every ball towards the leg side for a boundary and many a times ended up dragging a wide outside off delivery towards the long on region which yielded nothing for the Roorkee boy. But now we see him pushing the same delivery into the gaps on off side and thus increasing his radar on the field for singles as well as potential boundaries. Also, the Indian keeper has worked hard on his fitness which has really helped him improve his performance on the field.

The boy has now really turned himself into a mature man playing with responsibility and also putting up a price tag on his wicket. He has learned to take the game deep and also get his team to other side of the line. Converting his potential to performance, Rishabh Pant has definitely announced his arrival at the big stage. Of course, which Indian cricket fan could forget the memorable Gabba test match where Rishabh took India to victory with his man of the match performance.

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