MUMBAI: At this point, it has become a regular sight in Indian cricket: Rishabh Pant and Shubman Gill chatting in the middle of the pitch between balls/overs before ending it with a double tap on their bats and a double punch of their gloves. They would then go back to their respective ends and continue with a game.
It is a ritual for Pant more than Gill. They did a lot of it during the Chennai Test against Bangladesh where both of them scored centuries in the second innings. So much so that Gill had to tell Pant not to hit his bat too hard because it was a bit old and he wanted to preserve it. “If he didn't middle it (the tapping of bats) while in the middle, he would say, ‘no, let's do it again’,” Gill had said at the time in Chennai.
The 19,000 fans who turned up at the Wankhede Stadium on Saturday saw a lot more of it in the first hour and a half of play. It all began when Pant planted his front foot and drove Ajaz Patel on the very first ball of the day down the ground for four. He didn’t just stop there. Pant repeated the same thing and did it better on the second delivery to get the same result. Four balls later, India had 12 runs on the board from the over with another boundary coming through the third-man region. All off of Pant’s bat.
Coming into day two of the third Test between India and New Zealand, no one expected things to start the way Pant did. The hosts suffered a mini collapse and Pant was batting on one when Patel was getting ready to bowl at 9.30 AM. The general mood was to be prepared for another collapse in the first hour as New Zealand piled on. However, Pant, in many ways, gave a teaser into what was set to unfold in the very first over.
If Pant kicked it off, Gill followed up. After having inside-edged one of Patel’s deliveries in his next over, Gill stepped out and lofted the spinner inside out over extra cover for a four. Understanding the difference in the way the two batters operated, Tom Blundell did his bit by standing up to Matt Henry, who was bowling from the other end, when Pant was batting. For Gill, they had a conventional field and plans with the lanky pacer getting some extra bounce off the surface. None of it worked.
Meanwhile, taken aback by the counterattack, Patel’s line and length started to falter. Pant pounced on it. He brought out the trademark lap shot and then lofted him down the ground shortly after. Now, it is not as if he was going hard every delivery. When Henry was on, Pant was happy to get in line and defend, playing the ball on its merit. But against Patel, Pant was turning the heat — a reverse sweep was followed by another smack downtown. Tom Latham turned to Glenn Phillips off-spin but it didn’t matter. Pant had smashed the Kiwi down for another boundary.
In the first ten overs of the day, Pant, who had started the day at one run raced to 48 from 34. Gill, as hard as it can be, did not try anything unnecessary after watching Pant. The one moment he did, going after Phillips, Gill was dropped at long-on. After that, the No. 3 batter was not going to take any chances. They had already scored 65 runs in the first ten overs so there was no need for anything out of the ordinary. “We were just having fun in the middle,” Gill explained after the day's play in Mumbai. “It was all about trying to put them under pressure because then it is difficult for the bowlers to be able to bowl in that area consistently,” he added.
Soon, their respective fifties came — Pant’s in 36 balls while Gill’s in 66 — and India were out of the rut. Now it was time to build on. Over the next few overs, with Ish Sodhi and Phillips operating from either end, the duo tried to do just that. Pant’s first boundary since his fifty came after 20 balls when he smashed Sodhi through cover. The leggie, however, had the last laugh given the next ball came back into the leftie and trapped him on the pads.
Gill, batting with the same bat he used in Chennai, took over from thereon, and batted with discipline even as some wickets fell in the second session. The moment there was a bad delievery, he would dispatch it to pile on the bowler. Just when India was closing in on New Zealand's total and Gill nearing his century, second in as many months, India’s No. 3 faltered. He edged one off Patel and had to take the long walk back at 90 from 146 balls. Although India and Gill himself would have wanted to bat on, in the context of the game, he had done his job along with Pant.
From 86/4, India went to 180/5 by the time Pant got out and when Gill fell, they had reached 227/8. Washington Sundar would take India to 263 before they reduced New Zealand to 171/9 at stumps. But on a day when New Zealand started as favourites, Gill and Pant put their hand up to show they are the presence of Indian cricket. They are going to be the core around which the famous Indian middle order is going to operate in the coming years. And they did so while tapping bats and gloves all along and having fun in the middle.