India skipper Rohit Sharma said that the team management wanted to be ‘extra careful’ with Rishabh Pant’s injury after the wicketkeeper didn’t don the gloves on the final day of the first Test against New Zealand on Sunday.
“We want to be careful about where he is at, and what he is to us. Even when he was batting, he wasn’t comfortably running. He was trying to hit the ball in the stands. With someone like him you need to be extra careful because he has had a lot of minor surgeries and a big surgery on his knee,” Rohit said after India’s eight-wicket defeat to the Kiwis.
Pant suffered a knock on his knee while wicketkeeping on the second day and didn’t take up his position behind the stumps for the rest of the game, with Dhruv Jurel replacing him.
“He went through a lot of trauma in the last one-and-a-half years. When you are keeping, you have 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 per cent ready for the next one,” Rohit explained.
However, it isn’t easy to keep Pant out of a match, and he struck a scintillating 99 in India’s second innings on Saturday, helping the host recover from a 356-run deficit with a 177-run stand with Sarfaraz Khan.
During the partnership, there were a couple of occasions when Pant didn’t look too comfortable while running between the wickets, but more than made up for it by smashing nine fours and five sixes, accounting for 66 runs through boundaries.
“No one knows what goes on in his mind. He decides what he wants to do. That is the kind of freedom we want to give him because he has produced performances with that mindset. He wants to play in a certain way, and as a captain and coach, you want to back that,” the skipper remarked about Pant’s innings.
Pant, marked his return to Test cricket after almost two years on the sidelines with a century against Bangladesh in Chennai last month.
The 27-year-old was involved in a horrific car accident in December 2022 but staged a remarkable recovery through an intense rehabilitation programme, returning to competitive cricket in the Indian Premier League (IPL) earlier this year as captain of the Delhi Capitals franchise.
He subsequently featured in India’s T20 World Cup triumph, was part of India’s white-ball series in Sri Lanka, and remains a vital cog in India’s World Test Championship (WTC) campaign, with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia looming.
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