Of Rishabh and Reputations

How long do we look?

Reputations are weird things. When Rishabh Pant first broke into our consciousness, as a broad-shouldered, spike-haired Delhi teenager, he had already built a reputation as a destroyer of domestic cricket bowlers. He went to the Under-19 World Cup as a vice-captain and came back with a silver medal.

Short, with brute upper-body strength and the hand-eye coordination of the gifted, Pant could hit the ball a mile. He reminded us of, yes, that guy. And we’d been obsessed with that guy since we first laid eyes on him at an Australian summer, and then in Mumbai, and then, brutally, in Johannesburg. We had always wanted our own version. In Pant, we saw those shades. There was a bit of Gilchrist in Pant’s square cuts and bottom-handed flicks.

There was also, in Pant, a bit of the old Dhoni. The Dhoni who would play the most audacious shots in the most seemingly unlikely situations; the Dhoni who had the entire subcontinent in awe, a Pakistani army chief included; the Dhoni who was a biker turned cricketer. Captain Dhoni, the calmer, more calculated avatar, had given us many great afternoons and evenings, but he was impossible to emulate. No one can balance serenity and genius like that. But in that process of Marauder Dhoni turning into Captain Dhoni, we had lost a bit of his rawness we had loved so dearly. Pant brought that back.

The timing was worth noting. Dhoni had begun his home stretch—albeit without a definitive finish line—for India, having relinquished his captaincy to Virat Kohli. In a couple of years, if not earlier, the pathway to India colours would be clear.

And so, Trent Bridge and that six off Adil Rashid to announce himself. That century at The Oval. Sydney, twice. By that golden afternoon in Brisbane, he was a national hero. Ahmedabad and Cape Town were affirmations of something we knew well.

You can make a serious case that Rishabh Pant is India’s greatest ever wicketkeeper-batter in Test cricket. And he’s just 28.

But what of limited-overs cricket, its pace and zest, the things Pant seemed made for when we first saw him? The other two guys were naturals. Eight years of sparks later, Pant isn’t within an earshot of India’s ODI and T20 teams.

There are plausible explanations. In Test cricket, teams keep attacking fields, which allow Pant’s natural audacity to flourish through regular boundaries. That is Pant’s oxygen. Deprive him of boundaries for too long, and you’ll see him itching. The defensive fields of limited overs cricket cut off the supply for long periods. So, all we get is the occasional night of fireworks. But this is also a simplistic explanation. Pant is far too talented a player to not have worked out routes to quick runs.

Maybe he will, in time. But what we have, right now, is this player who is one of the first names on the team sheet in Test cricket, and a neither-here-nor-there player in limited overs. And yet, auction after auction, IPL teams splurge on him as if he somehow might find light. Zilch. It has been eight seasons since Pant racked up more than three 50+ scores in a single IPL season.

In the 2025 auction, Pant was bought by Lucknow SuperGiants for a whopping 27 crore, making him the most expensive player ever in the league’s history. LSG made him captain, possibly bending to his aspirations over more accomplished CVs, like Aiden Markram, who leads the South Africa T20 team. So far, Pant hasn’t generated the runs or the tactical nous. Last night’s outing against the Kolkata Knight Riders was an illustration of Pant’s frustrating returns with the bat and the lack of a captain’s instinct. He batted poorly, almost scared to take the kind of risks that would’ve pushed his team forward, and then selected LSG’s most out of form batter to start their one over shootout.

You will have to travel long and hard to find an Indian cricket fan who doesn’t adore Rishabh Pant. In fact, you might find many who once fought for him with their friends and families, convinced that the boy will one day become a great.

I think all of us, including the Lucknow SuperGiants owners and coaching staff, seek in today’s Rishabh Pant the Rishabh Pant we saw when he came as a spike-haired, broad-shouldered teenager from West Delhi, who took the IPL and Indian cricket by storm, who reminded us of Gilchrist and a young Dhoni. It’s hard to resist that impulse, and it becomes harder every time he does well in Test cricket, which is often.

The next auction is in roughly eighteen months. It will be fascinating to see if the scent from Pant’s youth can last that long. It’s either that, or Rishabh Pant finally figures out a way to platform his extraordinary gifts in more than one format.