The Rishabh Pant Bandwagon

Tickets bought. We’re firmly on board.

When Kevin Pietersen switch-hit Muttiah Muralitharan for six in 2006, the art of batting changed forever. 15 years later, 23 year-old Rishabh Pant is reverse sweeping another one of the game’s best ever Test bowlers, though this time around, it’s not a spinner. 

Jimmy Anderson has bowled nearly 35,000 balls in Test cricket, not many times has a batsman attempted to (let alone successfully) reverse sweep him. You just don’t really do it. Not in Test cricket. Not against the new ball. Not against Anderson. 

Enter Rishabh Pant, producing the sort of shot which causes more noise on Twitter than a two day Test pitch. The sort of shot that your seasoned commentators have to fight against branding as ‘improper’ and ‘reckless’. The sort of shot that says more about a player’s character than hitting a cricket ball really should. A young batsman doing their thing against a bowler with 614 Test wickets, we’re here for the confidence, audacity and outright talent needed to do it. 

Did we mention Pant was in the ‘nervous nineties’? That phrase and other cricket cliches are really being stress-tested by the keeper-batsman. Very few players have so clearly shown how taking a single after hitting a boundary is not necessarily ‘smart cricket’, especially when you can simply put it over the midwicket rope to bring up a third Test century instead… Smarty Pant. 

Kevin Pietersen will go down as one of the icons who changed modern batting styles and it’s not wrong to say Pant is a product of that era’s legacy. Though nowadays you could argue Pant is actually becoming a catalyst in his own right, not just adding a few paragraphs to the modern day manual on batting but instead ripping it up and penning his own how-to-guide. 

Pant’s talent has been clear for some time. His big break-through season in the 2018 IPL was nothing short of ridiculous. Very few players have looked more intent on smashing everything for six and more importantly, even fewer players had such consistent success in trying to do so. 37 sixes later, you know he had a good tournament when there was talk about MS Dhoni being replaced in the national side. 

Now the latter has retired, it’s time for Pant to lock in centre stage as an X-factor player across all formats, something every national team selector and cricket fan both crave. His fearless mindset combined with his StickCricket-esque ball striking is undoubtedly making him one of the most exciting cricketers in world cricket. The fact he plays and performs in Test cricket is an additional bonus which makes his game even more admirable. 

With Pant in the game, the predictability and conventions underlining Test cricket seem to drift. Traditional bowling plans, field placements and impossible run chases all come under serious questioning. Some would say he has already changed the dynamic of Test cricket. His match-winning innings at The Gabba was a glimpse at India both trying to win and draw a game (see Pujara 56 from 211 balls), something only possible when you have a maverick like Pant in the middle order. It’s only a matter of time before we see him win more games for India, and we don’t think he’ll be doing it at just a run-a-ball.

Defining his style as simply a positive attitude could be seen as cliche. Cricket has seen many ultra aggressive batsmen, though very few seem to have felt as free and outrageous as Pant (with even fewer having success in the longer format of the game). It obviously helps that he is unbelievably talented (the key to all good cricketers…) but what will make Pant so popular is that he’s breaking conventions and the mental boundaries around what is possible, all whilst winning games of cricket. 

Cricket needs creatives and the ideas they bring to the game. Forget squad numbers on shirts and Championship scheduling, Test cricket needs players like Rishabh Pant. Players who make you question when a game is really over. Players who can do what nobody else has considered, let alone tried before.  

In Rishabh Pant, both India and world cricket have an innovative entertainer of the highest quality. A true creator on the world stage, Rishabh Pant is either a superstar in the making or one already made (...we did say we were onboard).

— Will A for TwentyTwo Yards