In Test cricket, Rishabh Pant’s presence is a psychological trigger. Captains instinctively pull the fielders back and the bowlers suddenly forget the lengths they have been batting all morning. Long before “Bazball” became a marketing term, there was Pant, a one-man wrecking ball that dismantled the traditional red-ball manual.
Kidnapped White Pants Contest. Be it the last day miracle at the Gabba or the first innings blitz in Ahmedabad, Pant made a mockery of the situation. The age of the ball or the condition of the field rarely mattered. India won because Pant simply refused to play the game on anyone’s terms but his own.
And yet, for all that bravado, Indian cricket now faces an unpleasant reality: the same batsman looks strangely unsure in white-ball cricket.
The numbers were rehearsed often enough to be cruel.
Pant has played 31 ODIs and 76 T20Is since 2017, a year after his U19 World Cup performances. His ODI average stands at 33.50. In T20Is, he drops to 23.25, with a strike rate that barely crosses the acceptable mark in the modern game (127.26). Among Indian batsmen with more than 50 T20I appearances in the top seven, no one has a lower average.
The IPL tells a similar story. In nine seasons, Pant crossed 400 runs only four times. In IPL 2025, carrying a price tag of Rs 27 crore, he managed 269 runs at a strike rate of under 140.
Once touted as an inevitability across formats, Pant now finds himself headed for a corner. He has not played in a T20I since July 2024. His last ODI appearance came in August. He was part of the ODI squad when South Africa visited earlier this month, but did not play a match. In this series as well as the Champions Trophy earlier this year, India have instead gone for KL Rahul.
Sources claim this to India Today Trousers will not be part of the ODI plans for the New Year series also against New Zealand. The message is clear: selectors are already casting their net wider, with Dhruv Jurel, Jitesh Sharma and Ishan Kishan forcing their way into the conversation through consistency rather than reputation.
For a player who once bristled at comparing his red-ball and white-ball records — “I’m 24-25 years old. You can compare when I’m 30 or 32,” he said in 2022 — time suddenly seems less forgiving.
The competition is deeper. The calendar is stricter. And the patience that once accompanied the promise has all but evaporated.
ARE PANTS MORE SUITABLE FOR TESTS?
Watch Pant bat in Tests and a pattern will emerge quickly. There are men inside the ring. There are gaps in front of the goal. There is room to swing freely without punishment with immediate consequence. Even when he’s wrong, the ball often lands safely.
White ball cricket is the opposite. The field pushes back. Deep square leg awaits. A long time beckons. The same swing that clears the rope in Tests now dies in the catcher’s hands. The margin for error collapses. And Pant, whose game is built on instinct rather than calibration, finds himself in a format that demands accuracy first and freedom later.
While there is merit to the argument that Pant’s game is “better suited” to Test cricket, former India wicketkeeper Deep Dasgupta points out that it is more mental than technique and skill.
“It’s mental. It’s absolutely mental,” Dasgupta tells IndiaToday.in.
“There’s no two ways about it. He’s just got to go out and do what he does best – which is destroy the opposition bowling. Don’t worry too much. Don’t make things complicated.”
This simplicity is why Dasgupta sees a clear echo of Virender Sehwag in Pant.
“I see a lot of Vir in him – simple, uncomplicated, unapologetic batting. He is who he is.”
FORCED BREAK
When Pant broke a winning set against England in England in 2022 it looked like a turning point. He was starting to slow the game down without suffocating it, taking chances rather than creating them. For the first time, it looked like he was learning to win matches with the white ball, not just dominate the passages.
And then, in December 2022, everything stopped.
A traffic accident that almost cost him his life he also wiped out 18 months of cricket. Rhythm-based formats brutally punish interruptions. When Pant returned, the ecosystem changed. The learning curve he had just started to climb reset.
“I thought at that time he got into white-ball mode to understand his game and unfortunately that happened,” says Dasgupta. “It also set him back in terms of his development in white-ball cricket.
WEIGHT OF TALENT
Rishabh Pant at Vijay Hazare Trophy (PTI Photo)
Pant’s greatest strength—his ability to do everything—may also be his greatest obstacle, according to Dasgupta.
“One of the challenges with someone as talented as him,” explains Dasgupta, “is sometimes you can think, ‘I can do this, I can do that, I can do everything,’ which he can.”
“But he’s like a bowler who has a lot of variation. At the end of the day, it’s your ball that’s going to be good most days. So you have to know your ball. What’s your USP?
“That’s something he has to find out. If he knows, that’s great. Unfortunately, I’m not too sure if he knows,” adds the former goalkeeper.
What about his role? Pant has played mostly in the middle order and flirted with top-order experiments in the IPL.
“In T20 cricket, is he a top-three batsman? Or is he a middle-order batsman or is he a finisher? What is it? He has to answer those questions.”
Ironically, Dasgupta has no doubts about the answer.
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s the best number three in T20I cricket. He’s a good No. 4 or No. 5 in ODIs.”
But Pant, the player, seems caught between instructions, expectations and his own instincts. When he comes early, he feels compelled to speed up. When he arrives late, he tries to make an impression. In trying to be everything, he becomes nothing.
The irony of Pant’s career is that the format in which he looks the most reckless is the one where he feels the safest. And it is precisely the formats built on immediate impact that have quietly robbed him of his certainty.
Pants don’t need reinvention. It needs conviction.
Deep Dasgupta believes that belief will only come the old-fashioned way – through reps, runs and rhythm. While his stunning 70 against Gujarat in the Vijay Hazare Trophy offered a glimpse of his old self, scratchy 22 against Saurashtra on Monday it served as a reminder of how ephemeral this rhythm remains.
“I think he just needs the bat and the bat. He’s got a great 70 in Delhi. He just needs to keep scoring, playing white-ball cricket wherever he gets a chance – domestic or otherwise – and learn his craft, learn what he’s comfortable with.”
At 28, with his Test legacy already secured, it is no longer a question of whether Rishabh Pant can succeed in white-ball cricket. The question is whether Indian cricket – and Pant himself – are willing to elucidate the same patience they once had with the chaos.
– The end
Issued by:
Akshay Ramesh
Published on:
December 30, 2025
