Inside out | How long can India invest in Rishabh Pant, the wicketkeeper?

One criticism the Indian team management, under the leadership of Virat Kohli, always faces is that they don’t give enough chances to players to establish themselves on the international stage. Another level of criticism the captain faces is that people get unequal opportunities in the team setup. For Rishabh Pant, the first one does not quite hold true, but the latter one works well in his favour. 

He has been backed timelessly by the team management, and while he is yet to seize the opportunity in the shorter formats of the game, his Test numbers have been pretty impressive. But, his role in the team is not limited to flamboyant batting. He has a more important job of catching the edges that bowlers get after excelling in their skills. 

The fact that the team management preferred Wriddhiman Saha over him in the first Test when a prolific batter in Virat Kohli was available, but brought back Pant after Kohli’s departure says a lot about how the team management rates Pant’s credentials behind the stumps and also his batting abilities where the task isn't been easier. 

The team management has been on the horses for courses policy since ages, and it showed up when they swapped Saha and Pant as per the conditions and the desired team combination. But, Pant can’t have an excuse of not finding his feet as he has been around for more than two years, and, apart from the Adelaide Test against Australia, Pant has been the preferred gloveman on overseas tours emphasizing the team management’s greed of runs from his bat. 

But, has that greed of extra runs started to bite the team management in the face? If the pieces of evidence in the last two Tests are good enough sample size to assess Pant’s wicket-keeping qualities, it would not be unfair to say that the team has been let down by Pant on numerous occasions. He has been caught on the wrong foot a number of times, and at the same time, he has been too slow to react to big deflections off the bat against spinners while standing up to the stumps.

On the first day of the third Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), Pant dropped as many as two chances offered by Will Pucovski - one against Ravichandran Ashwin and another against Mohammad Siraj. Both those catches should have been taken without any fuss, but Pant made a meal of it. Luckily for India, Pucovski did not last very long and went back to the pavilion after hitting a half-century. But those dropped catches altered the flow of the game. 

Had Pant taken those catches, Steve Smith would have come to bat way earlier than the time he actually came out to bat, and the situation could have been different. But, Smith came out to bat only in the 35th over of the innings and by that time whatever chance the bowlers had of extracting any sort of assistance out of a fairly flat deck at the SCG went begging.

In the last game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) as well, Pant had dropped Pat Cummins’s outside edge off Ashwin but thankfully, for India, the bowlers had already got the better of the top order by then, and Cummins could not make the most of it although he denied India the chance of wrapping up a win by a margin of an innings. 

Pant’s looseness behind the stumps could well have exposed the Indian bowlers, but they have been incisive to create more frequent chances and Indian have not had to live with the consequences of the greed of too many runs.

Pant’s wicket keeping, especially standing up to the stumps against spinners, have left a lot to be desired, and it’s highly likely the team management would go for Saha once England come to India for a four-match Test series in February, highlighting the binary their choices have created in terms of the number one wicketkeeper in the team over the years, rather than backing either Saha to do the job of wicketkeeping while adding some runs with the bat, or heating up the stake for Pant to improve his wicket-keeping game.

On the other hand, Pant has been going berserk with the bat, and in the second Test at the MCG, changed the momentum of the game in India’s favour. His presence was not too long, but the sheer audacity of taking on a rampaging Cummins put Australia on the back foot and allowed breathing space for the likes of Rahane who was going well in his defiant innings. He has been going great with the bat and hence the temptation to play is also greater for the team management.

In defence of Pant, it can be said that he should get a longer and consistent rope to either establish his wicket-keeping skills over time and that he can be entrusted upon to improve his game with every match he plays, hence needing more investment from the team management, like the way they put their weight behind any batsman or bowler that they can improve to a better version of themselves. 

But, will Virat Kohli show patience with him, and what is the ultimate price the team management is willing to pay for trying out Pant in a full-fledged manner without shutting the door for him in the name of horses for courses? We’ll see when England will visit India next month.

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