Rishabh Pant added only 17 runs to his score on the second day of the Manchester Test, but numbers often don’t measure courage, which in his case would be only a thin line away from foolhardiness.
He came back to bat just around 18 hours after he was left unable to walk, even unable to put any weight on his right foot that was hit by a Chris Woakes slower ball. The choice of shot Pant attempted to that delivery – his version of a reverse-sweep – could be described as outrageous or reckless, depending on how one views the left-hander’s approach to the game.
That the blow resulted in a fracture was all but confirmed by the visuals, with the batsman almost dancing around the Old Trafford pitch in pain on one leg. When a golf buggy had to be summoned to take him off, one was pretty certain that it would be the last one would see of Pant in action in this game, and most likely, the series.
That was well into the final session on the first day, and there he was, before lunch on the second, limping out to bat after the fall of the sixth Indian wicket, having to take the support of the railing of the staircase on his way down from the dressing room. The feeling of awe and astonishment around the ground was palpable.
The return of the wounded warrior
There have been more than a few instances in Test cricket of players battling serious injury to come back on the ground to perform for their team. The feats of Anil Kumble (broken jaw, Antigua 2002) and Graeme Smith (broken hand, Sydney 2009) come readily to mind. It shows the competitiveness and team ethos that the players have.
A player with such a serious injury can’t possibly take full part in the subsequent proceedings in a match – Pant can’t keep wickets – and it leaves the team with 10 players against the opposition’s 11, a big disadvantage. Hence, the inclination to defy pain and physical discomfort to do whatever they can for the side.
It also puts the opposition into some sort of a quandary. England were clearly not expecting Pant to come out, and watching him hobble to the crease, they would have thought about their tactics against him. They tried to bowl wide at him to challenge his diminished mobility, targeted his body, and also aimed full balls roughly at his damaged foot.
Pant’s batting rarely follows the MCC coaching manual and he avoided further injury, in his own inimitable style. What’s more, he picked up a Jofra Archer slower ball from the hand and deposited it over the boundary, and then timed a full wide ball from Ben Stokes to perfection for a boundary to bring up his half-century, the value of which can hardly be calculated by the number of runs.
By this time, he was left batting with the tail after the dismissal of Washington Sundar. It took Archer a peach of a delivery, an almost replica of the dismissal on the final day of the Lord’s Test, to see the back of Pant. After he resumed his knock, India added 44 runs for the final four wickets, despite his running between the wickets being severely hampered.
Shorter formats of the game can hardly provide such drama and narratives. They measure a player’s contribution in terms of runs, wickets, strike rates and over rates. There’s no metric to measure the size of the heart, which comes to the fore in the longest format of the game, even when the scoreboard may indicate that nothing is happening.
Maverick
Pant’s is a special case. He may be thinking that life has given him a second chance, and he wants to make the most of it. By his own account, he was fearing the worst in the immediate aftermath of the car crash he suffered a few years ago. At the very least, his playing career was in serious jeopardy.
Such an experience often changes the mindset as one becomes more appreciative of life and what all it can offer. If one has stared down death and lived to tell the tale, there’s not much that can faze them.
Old Trafford was not the first time in the series that Pant had pushed through the pain barrier. Just days earlier, he had come out to bat in both innings despite getting a nasty blow on a finger while keeping wickets.
The heart Pant showed was in line with what Ravindra Jadeja displayed, in company of the Indian tail, in the previous Test at Lord’s. The game was all but gone at lunch on the final day before the all-rounder, along with Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj, got India closer to the victory target than anyone had a right to expect.
Such instances give an indication of the spirit in the Indian camp, much more than the words, and gestures, used by skipper Shubman Gill late on the third day of the third Test when England opener Zak Crawley used all means at his disposal to face as few deliveries as possible before stumps.
Aggression and fighting spirit are better displayed by action than loose talk. What Gill did may be a way to express genuine grievance at the opposition’s tactics or a ploy to get under their skin. It could also be how a new captain wanted to show who was in charge. He carried on harping on the same theme on the eve of the next game, but it would have been better if everyone just moved on from that fracas.
Gill may have felt supremely confident after scoring a mountain of runs in the first two Tests, and getting his maiden win as captain in Birmingham. But his returns with the bat have nosedived since, as he has only succeeded in pinning himself to a corner.
He could take a leaf out of his vice-captain’s book who is not only the current India batsman most feared by the opposition, but also the one spectators can’t take their eyes off. His courageous act at Old Trafford would have added respect to the long list of attributes.