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Sanjay Manjrekar shifted focus on Pant’s results, suggesting his approach has given him too much success to get questioned.
Rishabh Pant threw away two starts against Australia at the MCG.
Sanjay Manjrekar has come out in strong support of Rishabh Pant’s batting approach, asking cricket fans to criticize ‘only his failures’ and not the way he fails. The former India international suggested that Pant has played at least three great innings, averages 42 and has hit six Test hundreds and seven 90s with the same approach.
Pant got out for 30, trying to smash part-timer Travis Head. He had batted for over two hours, stabilizing things from one end with Yashasvi Jaiswal batting brilliantly on the other. But his wicket triggered a massive collapse, and India went from 121/3 — a position where some Australian players had reportedly accepted the match would draw — to 155/10.
Pant turned out to be the only batter apart from Jaiswal to score in double digits and India ended up losing the Test by 184 runs.
“Pant should be criticized only for his failures, rather than how he fails. He averages 42 in Tests with at least 3 great innings, ever played by an Indian! In 42 tests he has 6 hundreds & 7 nineties. He is a great player not scoring enough runs & that’s the crux of it,” Manjrekar wrote on his X account.
Sunil Gavaskar infamously called Pant ‘stupid’ thrice live on air when he got out trying a scoop in the first innings. After the second-inning dismissal, he was similarly critical.
“…The issue is you know there is this shot called sixer in cricket which is like a drug. Once you hit a couple of sixes, then you think that’s a real a high because once you hit the ball cleanly of the middle of the bat and it goes into the stands, there is no better feeling for a batter. Sixer is a different feeling and it’s a drug, it gets into your system,” Gavaskar said.
“At that particular point of time there was no need to go for a six, it was not going to win us the match. There was a long on there, there was a deep square leg there, so if a pull shot along the ground would have been attempted it would have got you four runs, and that is how it opened the door for Australia.”
Even skipper Rohit Sharma has said that he feels conflicted in dealing with Pant’s approach because he knows that it has given him success in the past but has been going against the team for a while because of the risks associated with it.
