Rishabh Pant’s shot-making can look spur-of-the-moment, yet those close to the India set-up keep insisting there is a method behind the colour. Two days out from the third Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy Test at Lord’s, batting coach Sitanshu Kotak described a player who enjoys drilling down into detail – but only before or after an innings.
“Rishabh actually talks a lot about what he does, when he does [it], why he does [it],” Kotak said at Lord’s on Monday. “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.”
The coach’s point was illustrated neatly in Sydney three winters ago. On the final day of that epic 2020-21 Border-Gavaskar Test, Pant strode out after Ajinkya Rahane fell in the second over. His remit was to save – maybe even win – the match; his approach was typically brisk. By lunch he had 73, by the 80th over he was 97 from 117 balls. Then Nathan Lyon tossed one up, Pant skipped down the track and miscued. He left the ground in a mix of anger and disbelief, later admitting Cheteshwar Pujara’s well-meant warning about the second new ball had planted an unwanted seed.
Kotak believes such moments have shaped Pant’s dislike of mid-innings advice. “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.”
India’s management see value in a free spirit and do not want to clip his wings, yet Kotak has been nudging the whole top seven towards patience. The past few seasons have thrown up plenty of bowler-friendly surfaces at home, where survival often felt like success. England pitches this summer have offered movement too, but Kotak worries about a trap: players thinking a boundary must follow every half-volley because something wicked may arrive next ball.
“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,” he 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.”
India scored at nearly four an over in the two matches so far – a tempo England usually fancy themselves to dictate – but Kotak does not regard that as evidence of all-out aggression. “We have batted well in both the matches,” he said. “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.”
In other words, the runs can still come quickly, just without the obligatory swish. That subtle shift will interest Ben Stokes’s bowlers, who have relied on miscued big hits to claw back control at Headingley and Edgbaston. If India’s stroke-makers hold their nerve and leave a few more balls – even Pant, silence permitting – those hanging deliveries may end up landing safely on the outfield instead of in fielders’ palms.
