Pant At The Receiving End Of A Raw, Unfair Deal

Pant’s inability to put a prize on his wicket has not been handled with kid gloves. While the selectors are well within their right to groom more than one player...

- Sreelata S. Yellamrazu

On the one hand, it is hard to decipher who is keeping whom in the dark: the Indian selection panel or Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Meanwhile Rishabh Pant, as the young twenty-one-year-old wicketkeeper-bats-man, is being handed a rather raw deal for not being able to fill right away some rather large boots.

Ravi Shastri talked about giving the young man a rap every time Pant throws his wicket away. M.S.K. Prasad talked about having narrowed down three potential wicketkeepers to replace Pant if Pant is unable to raise his game. But what the Indian coach and the Indian selector fail to realize is that this is a young man still breaking out of the mould of domestic games and under-19 cricket and coming to terms with national demands, whose weight is different compared to playing the Indian Premier League.