Magic in Electric Purple

On Pant and Prince

You never quite know where you are with 221-3 on day one of a Test. It’s neither poverty nor opulence, but suspended in the middle, waiting for someone to yank it to their side. Ben Stokes has just bowled an absolute beauty - what they call a ‘jaffa’ in cricket - to snipe out a well-set Yashasvi Jaiswal. It has now become a familiar sight to watch Stokes get possessed by a thunderstorm every time England are in trouble.

Enter Rishabh Pant, on his first day as India’s Test vice-captain. He’s only 27, with the smile of a college-going teenager and a face that still has the contours of youth, but he’s now the second-most senior batter in India’s Test lineup.

On his second ball, Pant dances down the track and whacks the ball past Stokes’ head. Four. Stokes breaks into hysterical laughter, almost keeling over, and walks over to Pant in his follow-through. One can only imagine the exchange, maybe some Geordie variant of “You taking the piss?” Stokes shadows Pant for a few seconds longer, still giggling at the audacity. He isn’t the only one. At least three groups on my WhatsApp have popped off with variations of, “Pant... 😂” and “HAHAHAHA”.

This is my favourite time of the year. A Test cricket summer. The breeze carries accents from islands in three different continents. I feel a bit like Nick Carraway arriving at West Egg, looking up at the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on trees, just as things grow in fast movies, watching life respawn with the summer. Cricket’s party jacket from spring has been thrown into the cupboard, and the summer whites are out. White on green is nature at its most soothing.¹

For a couple of hours before Rishabh Pant began his innings with a distorted guitar riff in harmonic minor, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill played Test cricket as inscribed in the hymn sheet. The calm duet of the bowler’s grunt and the ball thudding into the wicketkeeper’s gloves, the rippling tambourine in the background from the audience’s applause, and the occasional snare hit from a cover drive. It’s the song from a cricket tragic’s wet dream.

Jaiswal and Shubman’s tranquility allowed the mind to wander. I’ve been reading Tim Wigmore’s new book on Test cricket’s history, so I thought back to cricket’s most famous tagline: “cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties”. It’s a bit dramatic, a bit grandiose, as these things go, but I didn’t quite know the etymology.

The results from the internet search took me to places I wasn’t expecting to visit. Poets, drunks, New York, and then baseball². In a New York Clipper edition from 17th July, 1858, a writer, describing a baseball game, says, “the glorious uncertainty of cricket seems to have attached itself to this great kindred sport.”

I was just a toddler in 1858, so my memory is a bit hazy, but the literature and pictures from that time paint quite a different world. Monochrome, monocles, suits, tuxedos, bowler hats. Sport, especially cricket, too was different. It was amateur, and played on the nearest patch of grass owned by the resident squire of a WhatsApp group. They played through biblical weather on surfaces that wouldn’t even qualify as parks today, without armour against either elements or leather. I can see why cricket could be filled with uncertainties.

But thirty years later, once Test cricket was formalised and sampled for long enough, its first tempo sheet was designed. And it was written with such strong ink that the principles are followed to this day, 150 years later. Everything about this sport, particularly this longform anachronism, favours those who eliminate chaos.³

As I watched Jaiswal and Gill make further light work of England’s inexperienced bowling attack, I kept thinking - isn’t all of top-level sport just that? Wildcards might pinch the odd point here or there, maybe a game, but they won’t take sets off Djokovic at Wimbledon. In Pundits From Pakistan, Rahul Bhattacharya speaks of Tendulkar’s 194 not out at Multan - an innings that was mocked for its perceived slowness, and became infamous for some other things⁴ - as one which Tendulkar will be secretly thrilled with. Even by his stratospheric standards, that innings was control turned into art.

And what cosmic poetry that Tendulkar spent most of that innings standing opposite an anarchist who didn’t want to touch mechanical precision with a beanpole. Debut or World Cup final, if the ball was in his arc, Virender Sehwag hit, and then kept hitting. For a hundred and twenty-five years, Test openers had batted to set robust foundations. Sehwag batted to have a party⁵. When he was on crease, Test cricket shed its Oxford library hush for Rio at carnival - all rhythm, no rules.

Amongst tales of Hazare, Gavaskar, and Benaud, my grandfather broke into his widest grin while speaking about Mushtaq Ali. It’s a name lost to the backpages of Indian cricket history. A mere 11 Tests across the ‘30s and ‘40s, a career aggregate of 612 runs. Joe Root will probably score those many during this summer. But Grandad was fond of Ali for the experience, not the volume. Mushtaq Ali would charge at bowlers in the first over of the day, at an era when charging at bowlers was thought of as a vulgar, crude way of playing a genteel sport.

Mushtaq Ali and Sehwag’s kind break doors, introduce exotic dialects that predictably scandalise many, but eventually leave the sport enriched. Rishabh Pant is made of similar fabric. In fact, he is made of funkier material. Sehwag, for all his iconoclasm, still observed batting’s basic rules - elbow up, bat straight, Newton respected. Pant is pure circus. He’ll hop like a flamingo, tumble like a drunk acrobat, balance on one ankle while playing shots that shouldn’t exist in a coaching manual, then finish it all with a celebratory somersault.

Did he get out? Did he hit a six? Photo credit: here.

Here’s the thing about trapeze artists: in flight, they’re transcendent, making gravity seem negotiable. They routinely execute something most others wouldn’t even imagine of trying once. Sometimes they make it look disturbingly easy. But when they fall, they fall from a height, often tripping over themselves, swaying this way and that before dropping to the floor. In international sport, being comical is an insult.

Last December, at Melbourne, with the Australia vs India Test series poised at 2-1, with India trailing the Aussies in that game by more than 200 runs, Pant tried to play a flick - or a hoick, who even knows - and landed on his ass, watching the ball lob up gently and dip into the hands of a waiting, surprised fielder. Sunil Gavaskar’s fury in the commentary box was soon turned into reels and WhatsApp forwards. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Gavaskar probably got a bit carried away, but that shot looked really ugly.

Jarrod Kimber has written an incredible article on Pant recently, but his explanation of Gavaskar’s eruption is most quotable. “Gavaskar couldn’t understand any of it. This was not his cricket. It was not his language or tempo. It was an alien attack on all he loved. To him, Pant’s game wasn’t just reckless - it was from a timeline where Test cricket was raised by wolves.”

Imagine if Pant’s heave at Ben Stokes, with India at 221-3, had landed into the hands of a fielder. A cricket bat is 4.25 inches wide. Ben Stokes bowls the red cherry from 19 yards distance, at about 80-85 miles an hour. That makes it a muscle twitch’s difference between a boundary that leaves everyone spilling coffee and an ugly dismissal at the exact point where India needed some old-school certainty at the crease.

The term ‘Outcome Bias’ was brought into the mainstream lexicon somewhere in 1988, through this paper. In one study at the University of Pennsylvania, participants were given a bunch of medical scenarios, and the risks and benefits of every procedure. They were then asked to rate the doctors’ judgement in each case. The results revealed that the participants judged a doctor’s decision far more harshly if the patient had died during the procedure. We all judge outcomes through the prism of risk.

In sport, and life, risk is often a shifting window depending on context. If you’re coasting, a few aggressive moves is fine. If you’re in trouble, please don’t bet $1000 on Elon Musk knowing the first principles of application engineering. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t either. But let’s say our common friend here, Rishabh, pulls up Melon’s history. Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla. I mean, forget his public persona, but he’s been involved in some amazing engineering products. So, if the odds are good…

On February 4th, 2007, the night of Super Bowl XLI, the skies began pouring in Miami. American football can play through rain, but the half-time event, with its hundred million viewers⁶ and fifteen-million-dollar budget, can’t. The main act of the evening was Prince himself, with a twelve-minute set to close the show. You don’t play live music with electronic instruments when it’s raining cats and dogs. And you most definitely don’t wear heels and velvet clothing, erect an entire production with 25 different amplifiers, and play a gig.

Charles Coplin, the executive producer of the show, tells The Ringer, “I had made a call downstairs to the backstage area: “Are we good, are we good?” And then I finally heard from one of the people downstairs and I said, “Is Prince OK?” And then he said, “He [Prince] wants to know if you can make it rain harder.””

And then Prince delivered the most insane, mind-bending gig one could imagine. As if his divine fingers were controlling the clouds, the heavens opened wider just as Prince struck the first B-flat sus2 of Purple Rain.

Only Prince could. Credit: Getty.

99.9% of live musicians, Prince-included, would see rain and think problems. On Super Bowl night, with minutes to go before his name was called out on the public announcement system, Prince saw rain as a prop. That’s.. genius, yes, but also a completely unique kind of wiring. Risk is not merely different in such minds, but recalibrated to account for opportunity.

“He is taking so many risks that he isn’t living each one, they are part of his symphony of violence. He doesn’t hear each note, just the entire concert.

So he will continue to go hard and create even more chances and mistakes...He could pull back, but he doesn’t. He plays at his rhythm - one that he changes so frequently jazz musicians would get dizzy.

It means that opposition teams never feel comfortable.” - Jarrod Kimber on Prince, sorry, I meant Pant

Last week’s social media served up some post-game footage, cut like a documentary outtake really, where Pant was admonishing himself, the sharp words slipping through just as sharply on the stump-mic: “Khelne ki zaroorat nahi hai, Rishabh, theek hai na?” [There’s no need to play that, do you get it, Rishabh?] Close your eyes and you will hear a coach with a wooden ruler scolding a young pupil. Close your eyes once more and listen back to it, and you’ll hear a born showman arguing with his instinct.

Because he takes “risks” more often, way more often than most professional batters would be comfortable with, the amount of thought Pant puts towards his batting often gets hidden behind the smog of his Spiderman-hanging-from-buildings reputation. Pant scored centuries in both innings last week, becoming only the seventh Indian man to achieve this. The last time he came to England, in 2022, he scored an unbelievable 146 at a run-a-ball, after the top order had fallen like bowling pins at a new alley. He has Test centuries in Australia and South Africa too, almost all of them rescue-efforts.

Carefree vibesmen don’t get as far as Pant has in the toughest format of a sport.

The brain mangling bit of all this is - for long stretches of a Test innings, Pant bats with composure, like a normal Test batter. That’s what makes him so good, and there’s the jeopardy for the bowler and the fielding captain, even the viewer. In Pant’s mind, context has space, but only so much. Even if the skies are dark, the scorecard conveying caution like rolling thunder, if Pant’s eyes light up, he will go for the Hollywood shot. Or, even on the most hit-me delivery, he could decide, “not this one, nah.”

Which one will it be? Do you have $1000?

On his second ever ball in Test cricket, with India trailing a five-game series 0-2, with the score at a precarious 279-5 on day one, a 21-year-old Rishabh Pant danced down the track to Adil Rashid and deposited him into the grass bank near the Members Pavillion at Trent Bridge. Six.

David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd on commentary went, “Hello!”, following it with “I knew that was coming,” in his unmistakable Yorkshire lilt. By his debut, some of us had already sampled two and a half seasons of Pure Pant™ in the IPL to go with a sparkling under-19 World Cup and Ranji Trophy knocks for Delhi that gave his name a streak of electric purple. Bumble accurately relayed what we felt in that moment.

But what he, or us, couldn’t have known then was that he was distilling the sensory experience of every Rishabh Pant Test knock, throughout his career, into six words and a pause.

1. Green light is also used for migraine therapy.

2. No kidding.

3. Which kind of explains the inertia towards T20s.

4. If this event happened today, if Rohit declared with Kohli on 194*, there would be edits of it with Ekta Kapoor-esque cuts and orchestral music.

5. You should.

6. People in the US really like Super Bowl.