When India lost two quick wickets, England bowlers were clearly red-hot and Jofra Archer was really bowling at a pace tough to blink. But the man of the hour, season and perhaps even year, Rishabh Pant reverse-lapped the pacer for fun, up and above the slip-cordon and beyond the ropes for a six.
India lost the toss and from thereon, they also lost their two best batsmen – KL Rahul and Virat Kohli – early on in the encounter, going for the uber-aggressive approach. While that didn’t quite materialize, with England seizing the early advantage in the first T20I, pant’>Rishabh pant walked out to thunderous applause, it really looked like the Narendra Modi Stadium would come down. While he began with the simple approach, the single – of course, from thereon, he took an avatar un-researchable in the cricketing world.
The left-handed Pant, who walked in as India’s new No.4 batsman, ahead of Shreyas Iyer had really taken Kohli’s words seriously and did something crazy – for the books. Never in the cricket coaching manual will a coach ever accept and appreciate a lap, forget a reverse-lap but for Pant, manuals were thrown out of the window, long back.
Against Archer’s 148kmph thunderbolt, the southpaw cooly and casually reverse-lapped the delivery well and beyond the boundary cushion. Now if the Anderson shot came as a surprise to you, Archer was bowling well 20kmphs faster than the English legend. And it was really outrageous or pant-astic as the new-age dictionary calls it. He relished the shot, the crowd appreciated it and definitely left the English pacer raging, well seen in his next delivery, where he ramped up the pace.
