India batsman Rishabh Pant needs to improve his glovework if he wants to become a good wicket-keeper, former Australia batsman Dean Jones has shared that to Reuters. Currently, Pant has been going through a rough phase with both bat and gloves and also replaced by Wriddhiman Saha in the Test team. He was also considered as a successor of MS Dhoni.
“He’s still a young kid, still learning his craft, still doesn’t know what’s going on a little bit,” Jones said. “He needs to work more on his strokeplay through the offside. At the moment, he’s just a bit of a one-trick pony. We know he’s got an off-side game, he’s just got to work more. It wouldn’t take long to change but he needs to be very specific in his training programme right now.”
Jones gave the example of South Africa wicketkeeper-batsman Quinton de Kock, who top-scored for them in the recent T20I series in India.
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“Quinton de Kock changed his game, that was very evident in the last T20 series against India,” said Dean Jones. “Everyone thought he struggled to hit the ball between point and mid-off and they bowled there. But through lots of net practice and good technique work, he hit a lot of boundaries. And all of a sudden they couldn’t line him up properly because he had other options to score.”
“When you are going through a bad phase you start doubting your strokeplay,” Jones said. “Ultimately you’ve got to go with the gut feel when you play T20 cricket. And at the moment I think he’s second guessing his talents. We want him to be a 360 degree style player but at the moment he feels to me that he’s only 180. He only scores down the ground or on the leg side and once you get a player doing that, you can control them and shut them down.”
He even talked about the number 4 batsman as India have a strong top 3 batsmen – Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli.
“He’s a very important player, the number four has to come in at 10-2 or 100-2,” he said. “(India) probably didn’t have a glue player — to be able to work singles, still hit boundaries and be able to put on a good score — coming in at 10-2. The number four is a very difficult spot. They’ve got eight series now or 29 matches minimum to work out who is their number four. But the key is let that person have five to six games. If it doesn’t work then change it.”
“It’s normally a technical player who’s got good technique to do that job… You need a player who can stop the bleeding, not so much a player to go and belt it,” he concluded.
