India's Safety-First Approach Falters as Rishabh Pant Restrains His Natural Game

Turns out Rishabh Pant is a dab hand at doing impressions. At Edgbaston he showed off his new one, of the batter his coaches would like him to be. Pant was, by the standards of his own scatterbrained batting, a model of self-control, and restricted himself to just one glorious four and a single crisp, delicious six in the 60 minutes or so he was at the crease. They were good ones, a roly-poly sweep off Shoaib Bashir and a skip down the pitch to punch another of his deliveries over long-on, but otherwise Pant restrained himself to showing off his range of ascetic leaves, blocks and defensive shots.

There was, it’s true, the odd moment or two when he nearly broke character. He couldn’t help himself but come running out to try to belt one of the first balls bowled by Chris Woakes after tea over the road into the botanical gardens. He seemed to change his mind midway through his swing, and ended up scuffing it away for a single, like a kid reaching his hand out to grab a cookie and then yanking it back again as they remember the promise they’d made to their parents.

The crowd in the Hollies Stand actually started booing every time he blocked one, as if they wanted to goad him into playing the hits. Eventually Pant snapped and tried to hit Bashir for another six. But Bashir took a little pace off the ball so Pant didn’t catch it cleanly, and ended up being caught by Zak Crawley five yards in from the boundary. The problem is that Bashir’s bowling is just too damn tempting. He has taken four wickets in this series now, and every one of them has been caught in the deep. His Test career is turning into an advanced course on how to bowl when you’re being battered to all corners.

It all felt very different to the last Test on this ground, back in 2022. Back then, Pant smacked 146 off 111 balls in the first innings, then 57 off 86 in the second, and, even though England were on the wrong end, Ben Stokes enjoyed it all so much that he said afterwards how well he felt Pant would fit into his England team. And in the idle hours of a slow second session, it was easy to wonder exactly what it would be like to watch Pant bat if he was on England’s side rather than his own. Whatever else is hypothetical about it, you can be sure that one thing Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum wouldn’t be telling him to do is to try to play more defensively.

India, though, have retrenched ahead of this game. They have taken on the character of their coach, Gautam Gambhir, a fighting batter who once battled seven hours for 137 runs to save a draw against New Zealand. Their captain, Shubman Gill, scored a fine century off 199 balls, batting like a prefect who had just been on the wrong end of the headmaster’s lecture about leadership. They have left out their two scariest bowlers, Jasprit Bumrah and Kuldeep Yadav, and packed the side with three all-rounders, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar and Ravindra Jadeja, in an attempt to bolster their batting without compromising on their bowling options.

Reddy turned out to be Unready. He was cleaned up for one trying to leave a ball which hit the top of his off stump. The decision to pick him alongside Sundar was such a strikingly odd decision that Gambhir ought to be under heavy pressure, his team having won only three Tests out of 11 since he took over. But given that he used to be an MP for the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the BCCI are utterly intertwined with the political party, India’s board has given him their full support.

The safety-first style doesn’t especially suit India, and more importantly, it doesn’t especially suit the situation they’re in either. There isn’t a batter in the game who wants to face Bumrah or an English one ever born who enjoys facing the sort of left-arm wrist spin Yadav deals in. If the genie gave England three wishes this week, the first would have been for India to rest Bumrah, the world’s best bowler, the second would have been to leave out Yadav, who has taken 43 wickets at an average of 24 each against them across formats, and the third would have been to encourage India’s top order that they ought to amble along at three runs an over.

At that rate, they could bat for two days without racking up the sort of score that would make England feel outmatched, and all of the first four before they arrived at a target Stokes felt his side shouldn’t at least try for. In Gambhir’s day, a team who have made 310 for five in a day would have felt themselves well placed. In Stokes’ one, it was hard to avoid the sense that the score left them sitting just where England want them.