As it happens, Rishabh Pant is quite skilled at making impressions. He displayed his new one at Edgbaston, the batter his coaches wanted him to be. Pant was a model of self-control by the standards of his own haphazard batting, limiting himself to a single exquisite six and one spectacular four during the roughly sixty minutes he was at the crease. Pant was limited to showcasing his array of austere leavers, blocks, and defensive shots, but they were fantastic ones, including a roly-poly sweep off Shoaib Bashir and a skip down the field to punch another of his deliveries over long-on. It is true that there were a few instances where he almost acted out of character. After tea over the road into the botanical gardens, he could not resist dashing out to attempt to belt one of the first balls thrown by Chris Woakes. Like a child who reaches out to take a cookie and then yanks it back again when they remember the promise they made to their parents, he appeared to change his mind halfway through his swing and ended up scuffing it away for a single.
As if to encourage him to play the hits, the audience in the Hollies Stand really began jeering whenever he blocked one. Pant finally lost his temper and attempted to punch Bashir for a sixth six. However, Pant failed to catch the ball cleanly because Bashir took a little pace off it, and Zak Crawley eventually caught it five yards from the boundary. The issue is that Bashir bowls in a way that is simply too alluring. In this series, he has already claimed four wickets, all of which were caught in the deep. His Test career is becoming into a sophisticated lesson in bowling while being hammered in every direction. Compared to the previous Test held here in 2022, everything felt quite different. At the time, Ben Stokes felt that Pant would be a good fit for his England side since he smashed 146 off 111 balls in the first innings and 57 off 86 in the second, despite the fact that England was losing. It was also simple to imagine what it would be like to watch Pant bat if he were on England’s side instead of his own during the lethargic second session. You can be certain that Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum would not advise him to attempt to play more defensively, regardless of what else is hypothetical.
However, India has made cuts before this match. They have adopted the demeanor of their coach, Gautam Gambhir, a strong batsman who once fought for 137 runs over seven hours to rescue a draw with New Zealand. Shubman Gill, their captain, batted like a prefect who had just been the target of the headmaster’s leadership lecture and struck a brilliant century off 199 balls. To strengthen their batting without sacrificing their bowling options, they have added three all-rounders to the team: Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar, and Ravindra Jadeja. They have also left out their two deadliest bowlers, Jasprit Bumrah and Kuldeep Yadav.
Reddy proved to be unprepared. When he attempted to leave a ball that struck the top of his off-stump, he was cleaned up. With his team having only won three Tests out of 11 since he took charge, Gambhir should be under a lot of criticism because the choice to select him alongside Sundar was so glaringly strange. However, India’s board has fully backed him because he was a member of parliament for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the past and the BCCI is closely linked to the political party. The safety-first approach is not particularly appropriate for India, and more significantly, it does not fit their current circumstances. No batter in the game wants to take on Bumrah, and no Englishman was ever born to appreciate the kind of left-arm wrist spin that Yadav delivers. If the genie had granted England three wishes this week, the first would have been to allow India to rest world-class bowler Bumrah; the second would have been to exclude Yadav, who has taken 43 wickets against them at an average of 24 per over across all formats; and the third would have been to convince India’s top order that they should cruise along at three runs per over.
They could bat for two days at that pace without scoring enough to make England feel outmatched, and they would reach the first four before reaching a target that Stokes thought his team should at least aim for. A side that had made 310 for five in a single day would have felt confident in their position under Gambhir’s tenure. It was difficult not to feel that Stokes’ score put them exactly where England wanted them to be.