For Rishabh Pant, pain had become a way of life for more than 12 months. A constant, if uninvited companion. A grim reminder of what might have been, a reminder too of how lucky he was to have emerged from a life-threatening single-car accident with all his faculties intact.
Pant’s horrific road accident of 30 December 2022 is too fresh in memory, too raw for everyone even remotely associated with him, to bear detailed repetition. Suffice to say that to be able to play competitive, professional cricket within 16 months of that terrible episode was tribute to his resilience, to his unmatched determination, to his unyielding desire to make the most of a second chance that only the very lucky get.
If Pant doesn’t quite feel the pressure of a cricket match as much as anyone else, it’s not without good reason. To him more than anyone else, Keith Miller’s famous comments revolving around pressure in Test cricket will resonate readily. The dashing Australian all-rounder fought in World War II against the Germans, flying night missions over Germany and Occupied France as he targeted Nazi rocket bases.
Flight Lieutenant Miller once told Michael Parkinson, the legendary English television presenter, broadcaster, journalist and author, “Pressure? There’s no pressure in Test cricket. Real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt (a German twin-engine fighter and attack aircraft) up your arse!”
Even before his outlook-altering accident, Pant was a free spirit, an unpredictable mass of the unconventional even by the most unorthodox standards. No one quite knew what to expect when he had the cricket bat in his hands. He could dead-bat with felicity, sure, but it was when he put it to more attacking use that he commanded attention. Compelled it. He would sometimes be dismissed doing the most exasperatingly outrageous, just as he would drop jaws with his sheer audacity, with his ability to think out of the box, and to implement that thought process with total disdain for the usual, for reputation, for pedigree.
Pant 2.0 is no different. A lot more grateful and thankful for his second coming, so to say, but no less uninhibited or fearless. He certainly is more mature, he picks his battles with greater thought than previously, but he hasn’t gone against his natural grain. He hasn’t become conservative, careful or circumspect – all on the cricket ground, in front the stumps, lest we should confuse ourselves – because then, he wouldn’t be Rishabh Pant, would he?
And therefore, he reacts with complete equanimity to both ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid’ and ‘Superb, superb, superb’. He has an unabashed admirer in Sunil Gavaskar, the deliverer of both iconic lines but also completely in awe of the package that Pant is.
Twice in this Test series, Pant has overcome the pain barrier with a nonchalance that is uniquely Pant. In the third Test at Lord’s, he hurt his left index finger badly on day one, trying to stop a wildly swinging (after it passed the stumps) Jasprit Bumrah delivery that pinged him badly before speeding away for four byes. That was on the first day of the game; it must take something really bad for Pant to shed his wicketkeeping gloves and retreat to the dressing room and cede wicketkeeping responsibilities to Dhruv Jurel, but Pant the batter was back the next day with India on 107 for three in reply to England’s 387.
Pant didn’t just bat, he batted like the Pant the world knows and loves. With chutzpah and authority and positivity and aggression, without a care for the throbbing pain that was exacerbated by every movement of the willow. He charged and smashed, he fell and pulled or swept, he danced like a ballerina, he made even the hard-nosed, implacable MCC members populating the Long Room cluck and wonder at what he was made of. For two and a half hours, he toyed with England’s best, helping KL Rahul add 141 until a brainfade moment designed to put Rahul, on 98, back on strike in the last over before lunch on day three, threw England a lifeline and ended the Pant show on 72. Two days later, on the final morning with India needing 135 more for victory, Pant walked out at No. 6 but it was clear that the injury was troubling him even more. He wrung his left hand in discomfort during each of his 12 balls, one of them from Jofra Archer swatted through mid-on as if a pesky fly had got in his eyeline, before Archer had the final say with a peach that knocked his off pole out.
That should have been it, really, but as it transpired, that was merely the teaser, the trailer before the main act. A trailer that showcased his gumption and spunk, which expressed itself with far greater magnitude at Old Trafford on Thursday.
Pant recovered sufficiently from the finger injury in the week-long break between the third and the fourth Tests to start in Manchester in his designated stumper-batter avatar. Alongside Sai Sudharsan, he built on a decent start on Wednesday’s first day of the Test with a stand of 72, archetypal Pant, until suddenly, he decided that it was time to ramp it up. As Chris Woakes bustled in, Pant fancied a reverse sweep. It’s a shot has he has pulled off with impunity numerous times, it’s also a shot that has precipitated his downfall more than once, but when has that ever stopped him?
This time, Pant managed an inside-edge that crashed into the outer part of his right foot, just below the little toe. England missed the edge and burnt a review trying to prise him out, even as Pant was hobbling and wincing and biting his lip in sheer agony. He tried gamely to carry on but couldn’t even put the slightest weight on the offending appendage. When the physio peeled off his sock and then his shoe, it was clear why – there was a swelling the size of a ping pong ball, capped by a smattering of blood. Pant’s Test match should have ended then and there – at 37, retired hurt.
Driven off the field in a golf buggy, Pant struggled into an ambulance and went to a nearby hospital for a scan which confirmed the worst. The next morning, day two, when the team bus trundled into Old Trafford, Pant was nowhere to be seen. Of course, you said. Why would he?
Pant wasn’t in his hotel room, moping and brooding and cursing his luck. He wasn’t sleeping off the aftereffects. He was back in the hospital for a painkilling injection, after which he went to the dressing room for a few warm-up drills. When Shardul Thakur was sixth batter dismissed, he was stunned to see the stocky figure of his admirable mate making the impossibly arduous walk down the steps towards the middle. Thakur waited respectfully, admiringly, inside the field of play, for Pant to enter the ground. He patted him on the head like an older brother passing on his benevolence, then joined his colleagues on the balcony to watch the little fella smash an Archer slower ball over mid-wicket for six and check-drive a cover-drive off Ben Stokes to the boundary to bring up the most astonishing of half-centuries.
The warrior
Why, Rishabh, you wanted to ask. What were you trying to prove? To whom? Until realisation dawned that he wasn’t trying to be a hero. He wasn’t attempting what to others might have seemed outlandish. He wasn’t seeking to impress anyone. He was just being Rishabh Pant, because this is exactly the kind of thing Rishabh Pant would do, day after day if need be. To bat with an injured index finger is remarkable; to do so with one leg barely available to him, in a manner of speaking – defies logic, beggars belief, stretches the imagination, doesn’t it?
When he was dismissed, bowled off-stump again by Archer, Pant limped off to a thunderous applause. Stokes, himself the ultimate warrior, recognised and warmly congratulated his kindred spirit. More than 20,000 people rose as one, the Indian balcony could hardly hide its emotions, and Mohammed Siraj reprised the Thakur act of 59 minutes earlier, with another warm pat of the helmet. Pant retreated to the sanctum sanctorum, changed into shorts and practice shirt and started fooling around. Just Pant things, you know.
Cricket history is replete with numerous instances of mind over matter, of going above and beyond the call of duty. Followers of Indian cricket will remember Anil Kumble, apparition-like, bowling at the ARC ground in St John’s in 2002, his broken jaw wired and held in place by bandages, and snaring Brian Lara leg before. That was scary, surreal, goosebumpy; Kumble bowled because he could, and because he was waiting out the time to board his flight to Bengaluru where he would soon have surgery to fix the broken jaw. What to do with the time? Well, how about 14 overs in unbearable pain? How about the scalp of one of the greatest batters of all time?
For 23 years, Kumble has ploughed a lone heroic furrow. There were others before and after him – Rahul Dravid getting up after being floored by a bouncer to make an unbeaten 144 in the same series at the Bourda Oval. V.V.S. Laxman orchestrating two remarkable run-chases within a couple of months in 2010, at the P. Sara Oval in Colombo against Sri Lanka and at the PCA Stadium in Mohali against Australia when Pragyan Ojha managed what even ill-treating selectors hadn’t – make him angry. Sachin Tendulkar braving crippling pain in his back to nearly, nearly, take his team to the most famous of victories against Pakistan in Chennai in 1999. But they weren’t in the same Kumble league for bravery and/or foolhardiness. Until now. In Pant, the 10 for 74 hero has an equally extraordinarily pig-headed champion. Kumble and Pant, chalk and cheese, an odd couple, tied together by the bond of stretching, nay, smashing, the pain barrier.
