As Rishabh Pant played his blitzkrieg innings on Day 1 of the rescheduled fifth Test against England, former Team India head coach Ravi Shastri recalled an old chat with Rishabh Pant and how he had suggested the reverse-sweep to the swashbuckling wicketkeeper-batter. Pant displayed an array of attacking strokeplay as he smashed 146 off 111 deliveries at Edgbaston on Friday.
“Last thing I wanted to do was to tell him to not play that shot. I told him think about it, you’re getting out in this fashion and I am getting bored. Try something more outrageous like the reverse sweep or something of that sort,” Shastri said on-air.
“He looked at me and there was that spark in his eye, ‘you have given me a way out here’. He waited, next Test he got a hundred. He reverse swept Nathan Lyon a couple of times but he waited till Chennai to reverse sweep Anderson for a six. And then he did it to Jofra Archer in one of the ODI games (sic),” Shastri said.
Even during his knock in Birmingham, Pant tried to reverse-scoop Anderson, but did not get a boundary as he mistimed his effort.
