In a game obsessed with linear beauty and profound stillness, Rishabh Pant brings a chaotic curvature. His falling sweep/pull/paddle/reverse variants exemplify his geometry-defying stunts that have enhanced the cricketing lexicon.
He defies several well-worn truisms of the game. Be still at crease, the pundits croon. But he takes a stride across, crouches low, gets in line with the ball, depending on the ball’s trajectory, goes lower to get fully underneath the ball, and harnesses the ball’s pace to glide/scoop/flick the ball fine through the leg-side.
He bends his back knee, pins his weight on the front knee, which seems to collapse under the weight of the stroke and the unusual movement. Soon, his upper body too falls over, within touching distance of the ground. Then, like a man about to drown, he seems to flap his bat frantically in the air. When the stroke is completed, he is often fully on the floor, rolling over.
The first-timer would assume Pant has made a mess of a paddle sweep or scoop. But the wicketkeeper-batsman finds that he has sweet-spotted the ball. In the next frame, it is flying to the fence, in the arc from backward square leg to an extra fine fine-leg. Bowlers, the audience, and his own teammates are left in shocked awe. Eight years into his international cricket career, perhaps it no longer shocks the audience, but still amuses them.
It has fascinated none other than Sachin Tendulkar, himself a voracious employer of the sweep and its variants. He recently configured the methods behind the madness. “The sweep shot that he played, he likes to get under the ball to scoop it with some elevation,” Tendulkar said on Reddit. “People think he has fallen, but it is intentional so that he can get under the ball. The secret to playing those shots is to be able to get under the ball. So it’s a planned fall; he doesn’t go off-balance. All that depends on the length of the ball.”
The premise is simple, but the execution is far less so. A lot can go wrong here. He might easily flick it into his own body, face or leg, like Pant did at Old Trafford to his own toes when attempting the reverse variety. Miss and be trapped in front or bowled and made to look silly and clownish. Besides, it’s hard to control the exact destination of the ball once contact is made.
Pant has his eyes hawkishly over the ball, the contact point is almost always precise, the weight imparted to the short is ounce-perfect and he is serenely still when his bat makes contact with the ball. Like a Cristiano Ronaldo header when he suspends in air to let the ball arrive and make the strongest contact, he stays in a perceivably off-balanced shape and waits for the ripest point. It’s even more difficult because Ronaldo is leaping, whereas Pant is falling down, and hence supposedly has less control.
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But rather than a shot in the dark, he is conscious of every single muscle of his twitching, making the potentially risky exercise of batting in Tests resemble a cartoonish imagining of a video game.
Not that the stroke has a hundred percent success rate. But more often than not, it finds the ropes. Even if he misfires at times, Tendulkar wants no one to disturb him. “There were occasions where people felt he doesn’t have to play that shot, it’s not the right time, but someone like Rishabh should be left alone,” Tendulkar said. They say great players can bend the script to their will, but some can bend their body to their will too. Like Pant and the falling whatever.
