It must have been an emotional day for Rishabh Pant at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai as he returned to Test cricket after a gap of 634 days. He had last played the format back in December 2022 against Bangladesh away from home and made a comeback against the same team today. On his return, Pant was tasked with a tough job as he came out to bat with the team reeling at 34/3.
However, the left-hander did a good job of stabilising the innings alongside Yashasvi Jaiswal. It took seven balls for Pant to score his first runs in Tests in almost two years and soon found his groove as well playing authoritative strokes against the opposition bowlers. When he reached a score of 19 runs, Pant created history becoming only the second Indian player to complete 4000 runs as a wicketkeeper in international cricket.
It is startling to see that MS Dhoni was the only Indian player until now to go past the 4000-run as a wicketkeeper at the highest level. Dhoni amassed 17092 doing his job behind the stumps during his illustrious career. Pant has joined him on this list now but his comeback was cut short by Hasan Mahmud when he was on 39 runs.
Syed Kirmani is next on this list with 3132 runs for India and interestingly, Rahul Dravid is also on the charts at the sixth place having partly taken over the gloves for India when Sourav Ganguly was the Indian captain. Dravid mustered 2300 runs as a wicketkeeper in 64 ODI innings while he never kept wickets in Tests.
Most runs for India as a wicketkeeper in international cricket
| Players |
Runs scored |
| MS Dhoni |
17092 |
| Rishabh Pant |
4020 |
| Syed Kirmani |
3132 |
| Farooq Engineer |
2725 |
| Nayan Mongia |
2714 |
| Rahul Dravid |
2300 |
India's playing XI: Rohit Sharma(c), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant(w), Ravindra Jadeja, Ravichandran Ashwin, Mohammed Siraj, Jasprit Bumrah, Akash Deep
Bangladesh's playing XI: Shadman Islam, Zakir Hasan, Najmul Hossain Shanto(c), Mominul Haque, Mushfiqur Rahim, Shakib Al Hasan, Litton Das(w), Mehidy Hasan Miraz, Taskin Ahmed, Hasan Mahmud, Nahid Rana
