Rishabh Pant is a virtually unique player to deal with as an opposition captain. Not many bat like him in Test cricket.
Indeed, there have been explosive players like Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers, known for aggressively taking on their opponents and striking the ball to various parts of the field.
But there have not been many who bat at the same tempo as Pant, and I don’t mean strike rate when I say tempo.
In both innings here, right on the second ball, he has dashed down the pitch aiming to send the bowler’s delivery out of the park. One attempt saw the ball sail directly over Ben Stokes’s head, while another shot off Chris Woakes soared beyond the slips for a boundary.
After those aggressive attempts, he often enters phases where he doesn’t take risks, opting instead to defend half volleys for five to seven overs. Eventually, he resumes his attacking style, seemingly after some internal deliberation.
Ben Stokes could have been more aggressive early on in Rishabh Pant’s second innings
There are few batsmen in the game with such an unorthodox approach and tempo
There is method to his madness, but only he knows what it is, whether he is going to defend or attack, and because of that unique nature, I can see why it leads to opposition captains thinking outside the box.
Things were fairly normal to start with on Monday, but then when Pant started charging, hitting the ball to various places in the deep. Stokes seemed to think: here’s a lad who could get himself out. He was either blocking or slogging, so the calculation was that putting men in the deep would result in a chance being created.
That does two things: it maybe stops the huge shots being played but it also gives the opportunity to take singles.
What I didn’t like was the phase early in Pant’s innings, when he was cross with himself, and England allowed him to knock the ball into a gap and walk down the other end.
It’s an odd thing to say about a player who has scored as many runs as Pant, but that’s when you want to keep him on strike, because that is the best time to get him out.
A team can take advantage when he’s getting frustrated with himself, because after four or five dots, he might try to do something stupid. Instead, he was calming down at the non-striker’s end.
He must be an incredibly difficult bloke to coach because, as Sunil Gavaskar alluded to with his ‘stupid, stupid, stupid’ comment in Australia last winter, Pant will do things that absolutely wind you up, but he will also get hundreds — as he has done twice here.
India’s other second-innings centurion, KL Rahul, batted at the same tempo throughout the day, but Stokes’s tactics were motivated by Pant’s idiosyncrasies.
Pant slogs sometimes and blocks at other times, leaving the bowler second guessing
Stokes felt as though he could get Pant caught in he deep but Headingley favours slips
He removed his slips and put fielders back. It was one of the few times that I have seen Stokes go defensive. As I say, he did so because he clearly felt that he was more likely to get Pant caught in the deep.
Even with Pant playing like he is, though, Headingley remains a caught-behind-the-wicket place — about 50 per cent of catches here are taken in the cordon.
Think of the number that have been held and dropped between the wicketkeeper and gully in this match. In Leeds, you have to keep your catchers in, so I was very surprised that Stokes had no slip fielders.
Sod’s law then that Pant nicked one for four where first slip would have been standing. Then, after Stokes had put a man there, Pant nicked one through the vacant second-slip area.
Stokes is usually an attacking captain but seemed to drift away from his modus operandi
What Stokes could have done, as he often has — especially when captaining spin in Asia — was set in-out fields. That would have provided him with men round the bat — prime real estate for Test cricket in Leeds — but also fielders in the deep.
It wasn’t as if he went defensive all day — he kept the slips in to Rahul. But as a captain, he has always told his bowlers that first and foremost they should be thinking about how to get wickets.
This was the first time I can recall him moving away from his modus operandi of trying to dismiss an opponent.
