How Rishabh Pant combined impactful knocks with improved safe glovework

Man of the series Rishabh Pant showed against Sri Lanka that he had improved his glovework by leaps & bounds to add to his considerable batting skillsThere is an advertisement featuring India keeper-bat Rishabh Pant that shows him speaking about his reverence for former India skipper MS Dhoni and how he used to cut out his pictures from newspapers and magazines and store them without knowing that one day, he and Dhoni would appear in the same photograph. It's quite a symbolic ad. Every aspiring young Indian keeper-batsman in the last decade wanted to be MS Dhoni. Pant was no different. It proved to be quite a heavy cross to carry though. Pant felt it on his home ground at the Ferozeshah Kotla in New Delhi in an ODI vs Australia in 2019 where he fluffed chances and messed up on DRS calls and heard the crowd chant "Dhoni, Dhoni". It was a rude message about what the fans thought of his skills, especially with the gloves.

Cut to Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore, three years later. Pant is crowned man of the series for his impactful knocks in the Tests vs Sri Lanka, but more importantly for his safe glovework on crumbling pitches to Ashwin, Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja. Between Kotla 2019 and Chinnaswamy 2022, we have witnessed effervescence and eccentricity with the bat too resulting in freak shows at Sydney, Gabba, Motera and Cape Town. What has changed? "He does not have fear of failure now. That has allowed him to be relaxed behind the stumps. You excel behind the stumps only when you have a relaxed mind which enables you to have a relaxed posture. Then you move freely, and your footwork and head positioning improve. One sees that happening with Rishabh today," says former India wicket-keeper batsman Saba Karim, also a