Rahul Dravid and Rishabh Pant in an animated conversation in Rajkot.
Highlights
- India head coach Rahul Dravid is confident of Rishabh Pant's batting skills
- Head coach Rahul Dravid has thrown his weight behind Rishabh Pant
- Rishabh Pant struggled to fire with the bat against South Africa
Rishabh Pant has the backing of head coach Rahul Dravid despite his poor form with the bat in the recently concluded series against South Africa.
Captain Pant managed just 58 runs in the five matches in the T20I series that ended in a 2-2 draw. India bounced back after losing the first two games to set up the decider in Bengaluru. However, constant downpour wiped out the game as both India and South Africa shared the honours.
Despite poor form with the bat, Dravid stressed on the fact that Pant is an integral part of the Indian team that will participate in the upcoming T20 World Cup in Australia.
"Personally, he would have liked to score a few more runs but it is not concerning him. Certainly, he is a very big part of our plans going ahead in next few months," Dravid said.
The former India skipper further said that he won't be 'critical' and that he backed Pant to play his natural attacking style of batting.
"I just don't want to be critical. In the middle overs, you need people to play a slightly attacking brand of cricket, to take the game on a little more.
Sometimes it's very hard to judge it based on two or three games," the head coach said.
In fact, Dravid was impressed with Pant's strike rate of 158 plus during the IPL where he managed an underwhelming 340 runs for the Delhi Capitals.
"I think he had a pretty good IPL in terms of strike rate even though it might not have looked good on averages. In IPL, he looked to move up a little bit (in terms of averages) and probably three years ago he was on those numbers.
"We are hoping that we can get those numbers from him at the international level. Pant's is a high risk game that comes with a price and the coach is ready to pay the price looking at the bigger picture," he said.
"In the process (of playing an attacking game), he might go wrong in a few games but he remains an integral part of our batting line-up with the power he has and the fact that he is a left-hander is important to us in the middle overs, he played some good knocks," the coach said.
Talking about Pant's captaincy, Dravid said that he is happy how the wicketkeeper-batsman led the team, given the fact that India was staring at losing the series.
"To bring a team back from 0-2 down and to level it at 2-2 and give us a chance to win was good. Captaincy is not about wins and losses only.
He (Pant) is a young captain, growing as leader. It is too early to judge him and you don't want to do that after one series," Dravid said.
"It was nice to see he has got opportunities to lead, keep and bat. He had a lot of load on him but gaining from that experience and credit to him for ensuring that we went from 0-2 down to 2-2," the coach was all praise for the stand-in skipper."
India will now play a two-match series in Ireland where Hardik Pandya will lead the side with VVS Laxman as head coach.
(Inputs PTI)
