Ganesh Kendale
BENGALURU: A near fatal car accident in Dec 2022 and resultant injuries and rehab may have kept Rishabh Pant out of the game for over a year-and-a-half, but his gritty comeback has the support of the team management, which is ‘extra careful’ while handling the wicketkeeper batter’s workload.
Rohit Sharma revealed that as a precautionary measure, Pant was not behind the stumps on the final day despite batting in India’s second innings during his dazzling knock of 99.
“He has had a massive operation. We must be a little careful about where he is at and what he is to us. Even when he was batting, he was not comfortably running and was trying to only put the ball in the stands. When you are keeping, you need to bend every ball with your knee going down. And the wicket being what it was, we thought it was the right thing to do for him to stay inside and get 100% ready for the next one.”
On handling Pant with care, the skipper stated, “With someone like him, we just need to be extra careful. Because he has had a lot of minor surgeries, one big surgery on his knee. He has also gone through a lot of trauma.”
Rohit also stressed on the team management’s acceptance of Pant’s unconventional approach towards his game. “To be honest, no one knows what goes on in his mind,” Rohit admitted.
“He decides what he wants to do. And that is the kind of freedom we want to give to him because he has produced performances with that mindset. I don’t think there is anything that you need to speak to him about. Before the second innings, we just told him, ‘please understand the situation’ and stuff like that. But he wants to play in a certain way and we want to back that,” explained Rohit.
