Rishabh Pant is a big part of our plans going ahead: Rahul Dravid

Rishabh Pant has been under fire of lately owing to his dismal batting returns in T20Is for India. He led the team in the recently concluded series against South Africa in the absence of senior players like Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul. Although the series was very entertaining, with it ending in a 2-2 scoreline, Pant didn’t have a good outing as far as his batting is concerned.

The 24-year-old amassed just 58 runs in four innings in the series, at a poor average and strike-rate of 14.50 and 105.45 respectively. Infact, he has represented India in 48 T20Is so far and has amassed 741 runs at an average of just 23.15. His strike-rate of 123.91 isn’t impressive either.

Pant’s T20I numbers are nowhere as good as his IPL numbers but India head coach Rahul Dravid still believes that he is an integral part of the team and that he has a big role to play in the coming time.

“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 during the post-match press conference of the fifth and final T20I of the series.

Dravid also said that he is not willing to judge Pant on the basis of just one series and that he would like to observe him further. He also told that Pant is a very important player in the middle-order for India.

“I just don’t want to be critical. In the middle overs, you need people to play 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,” Dravid said.

The head coach also reminded everyone how Pant maintained a strike-rate of over 158 during the IPL while scoring 340 runs, even though his average was in the 20s.

“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.”

“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,” he said.