Rishabh Pant shuns conventional wisdom again with breathtaking innings... and a poser for...

[ASFN Admin]

India vs England, first Test: live scoreboard As Rishabh Pant walked out to the crease, sensible Indian minds were focused on one thought alone: how India could draw the Test match. India’s position was already one of despair; ample rough outside the left-hander’s off-stump that threatened to rapidly make it even worse. In Test history, there is an accepted way to approach such a situation: austere defence. Playing in such a way has two benefits. Most obviously, in theory it makes batsmen less likely to get out. But there is also an ancillary benefit: if players get out defending on a turning pitch, they are unlikely to get much criticism, for they will have approached the situation in the accepted way. As John Maynard Keynes observed, following conventional wisdom stops you from getting fired. Pant has never been the sort to care for conventional wisdom. This spirit of individualism has run through his remarkable journey to the Indian team from the small northern town of Roorkee, a backwater in Indian cricket. Pant overcame this disadvantage through dedication, single-mindedness and unstinting belief in his own capabilities. From the age of 12, he travelled six hours overnight on the 3am bus to play in Delhi; he moved three times as a teenager in pursuit of opportunities, and was thrown out of Rajasthan’s age-group teams for not being a local. Pant’s ultimate riposte was to score so many runs, in his own inimitable style, that first Delhi’s under-age selectors, then their state selectors and finally India’s selectors, could not ignore him. At Sydney last month, Pant entered after India had lost their skipper, Ajinkya Rahane, to the tenth ball of the day. India needed to bat another 96.2 overs to secure a draw; the extra 305 runs required for victory seemed purely notional. Yet Pant’s approach to batting for a draw was to bat as if chasing a win. He used his feet with elan to target Nathan Lyon, forcing Tim Paine to withdraw the man who should have been his main threat. Pant’s assault changed the entire feel of the game, pushing Paine to remove close catchers - and so improving India’s chances of getting that draw. There was risk in Pant’s approach - on a fifth day wicket against an attack as skilled as Australia’s, how could there not be? - but to follow conventional wisdom would have been no less hazardous.

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