Rishabh Pant Falls for 81 After Wild Slog Against Afghanistan: A Dismissal That Raises Old Questions About the Most Gifted Chaos Agent in Test Cricket

The Innings That Had Everything Except Three More Numbers

Watching Rishabh Pant bat in a Test match is one of cricket’s most reliably entertaining and frequently exasperating experiences. The talent is extraordinary, the entertainment is constant, and the sense that the innings might end at any moment is always present, hovering just behind every shot that connects cleanly and becoming suddenly concrete the moment it does not. Day 2 of India’s one-off Test against Afghanistan at Mullanpur gave those who watched it the full spectrum: an early escape, a run-out scare, a partnership worth 169 runs, and a dismissal that came not from the bowler being too good but from the batsman choosing to take on a delivery he did not need to take on.

Rishabh Pant was dismissed for 81 in the first session of Day 2. The wicket went to Afghanistan captain Hashmatullah Shahidi, bowling off-spin. Pant stepped down the track looking to clear long-off; instead, he spliced the ball straight up with barely any distance. Azmatullah Omarzai, stationed at deep mid-off, shuffled slightly from his position and pouched the catch comfortably. The bowler celebrated. Pant walked off 19 runs short of the hundred he had been building toward since the previous afternoon. India, simultaneously, went from 416 for three to 456 for six in what the scorecards record neutrally but what felt, at the time, like a small but sharp shift in the morning’s atmosphere.

Who fell? Rishabh Pant, 81 off 121 balls, first fifty in five innings after a lean series against South Africa. How? A wild slog against the off-spinner, spliced to deep mid-off. When? First session of Day 2, Sunday June 7. Where? Mullanpur, Punjab. Why does it matter? Because in a match India are winning comfortably, the failure to convert a fifty into a hundred is the human story within the comfortable result, and because the manner of the dismissal raises the perennial Pant question: is it brilliance or recklessness, or is the line between them so thin that asking the question misses the point?

The Reprieves: How Pant Was Given Two Lives Before Using Neither to Best Effect

Pant’s Day 2 innings began with an immediate and significant piece of fortune. In the early stages of the morning session, he edged a delivery to the wicketkeeper. The edge was audible enough to generate an appeal. Afghanistan, however, failed to take the review. The not-out decision stood. The innings continued. Pant, given a life at a stage when his score was in the teens or twenties, had the opportunity to build the kind of innings that such escapes are meant to enable.

The second escape was a different kind, and more dramatic in its execution. During the 101st over, Pant jogged rather than ran toward the non-striker’s end for a single. The casual running, the casual body language, the kind of lazy conversion between the wickets that experienced fielding teams are trained to exploit: the wicketkeeper spotted it, picked up the ball, and launched a direct hit. Pant, realizing he was short, stretched at the last moment and survived by what appeared to be the narrowest possible margin.

These two reprieves, coming in sequence through the morning, are the foundation of the frustration that accompanies the ultimate dismissal. When a batsman is given two chances and still ends the innings at 81 rather than 100 or above, the accumulation of opportunity and the failure to capitalize it carries its own weight. The margin between what the innings was and what it could have been is visible and specific, not abstract.

The Partnership: 169 Runs With Gill and Its Place in India’s Day 2 Story

Before the dismissal and its circumstances, the productive context of Pant’s innings deserves full acknowledgment. His fourth-wicket partnership with captain Shubman Gill realized 169 runs, extending an overnight stand that had carried India from 368 for three to the point where any remaining competitive question in the match was comprehensively answered.

The partnership functioned because the two batters brought complementary qualities to a shared task. Gill, having already reached his century on Day 1, was batting with the focus and control of a player building toward a substantial score. His eventual dismissal for 126, caught behind, came with the partnership’s value already secured and the first innings platform established beyond any realistic Afghanistan response. Pant’s role within the partnership was to maintain the scoring rate, prevent any period of consolidation that might allow the bowling attack to regroup, and apply the specific pressure of a batsman whom opposing captains find almost impossible to set fields for.

The 169 runs represents the fourth-wicket stand’s contribution to an India total that has continued building beyond any competitive threshold. In that context, Pant’s innings was successful regardless of its mode of dismissal. The hundred, had it come, would have been the personal monument on top of the collective contribution. Its absence is a footnote to the partnership’s value, not a negation of it.

The Dismissal: When the Wild Slog Finds the Wrong Result

The delivery that ended Pant’s innings was from Hashmatullah Shahidi, the Afghanistan captain bowling off-spin. Pant made the aggressive read, stepped down the track to take the spinner on the full, and swung with the intention of clearing long-off and sending the ball over the boundary. The execution did not match the intention. The ball came off the top edge or the outer edge of the bat with barely any of the power or distance required, ballooning straight up into the air toward the deep mid-off region.

Azmatullah Omarzai at deep mid-off made minimal adjustments to his position, settled under the ball, and took a catch that required technical competence but no drama. The dismissal was completed without fuss. Pant’s hundred, which had been a realistic prospect through the morning and a compelling subplot of the day’s cricket, was over.

He stepped down the track trying to tonk the ball over long-off, but instead spliced it straight in the air with barely any distance. Azmatullah Omarzai shuffled slightly from his position at deep mid-off to take a secure catch.

The phrase “barely any distance” captures the specific quality of the dismissal. This was not a big swing that found a fielder at the boundary rope. This was a miss-hit that reached mid-height and landed in the hands of a fielder who had very little work to do. The gap between the intended result and the actual one was total.

The First Fifty in Five Innings: Context for the Dismissal

One piece of context that makes Pant’s failure to convert more pointed is that this was his first half-century in five Test innings. The home series against South Africa in late 2025, during which India lost 2-0, was a difficult one for Pant personally: he failed to cross the 30-run mark across his appearances, contributing to a batting collapse that the team as a whole could not overcome.

The innings against Afghanistan represented a return to form in the most visible way: a half-century that extended toward a substantial score, built across parts of two days, with the qualities of patience and selectivity that Abhishek Nayar had praised after Day 1. For a player returning from a lean patch, converting a fifty into a hundred carries additional significance. It is not just a personal milestone. It is a statement about the return of form and the completion of the process that a lean patch interrupted.

The dismissal at 81, particularly through a shot that represented a departure from the controlled approach of the innings, is therefore the mirror image of what might have been. Not a failure, because 81 off 121 balls with six fours and three sixes represents a genuinely significant contribution. But a question mark, the kind that follows Pant through his career and that his greatest admirers and most persistent critics share as a framework for discussing what he is and what he could be.

The Collapse: From 416 for Three to 456 for Six

The rapid sequence of wickets that accompanied and followed Pant’s dismissal deserves its own accounting. India moved from 416 for three, with Gill and Pant established at the crease and the partnership 169 runs old, to 456 for six in a session that saw three wickets fall in short succession.

Gill’s dismissal for 126 removed the anchor. Jurel’s dismissal for 19, caught by Mohammad Saleem Safi’s nip-backer to the top of off stump, removed the brief resistance of the new batter. Pant’s dismissal for 81 completed the three-wicket cluster. Afghanistan, who had spent most of two days attempting to stem a batting tide that was always too strong for their bowling attack, briefly found the rhythm that had largely eluded them, and took three wickets that compressed India’s total rather than expanding it as the partnership had been doing.

The collapse, such as it was in the context of a team already at 416, is more interesting as a narrative moment than as a competitive one. India’s position in the match was not threatened by the three wickets. The total continued building beyond 450 and toward 475 at the time of writing. But the morning’s end had a different quality than its middle, and the Afghanistan bowlers found something in the later overs of the session that the opening exchanges had not provided.

Sundar and the Debutant Suthar: The Final Chapter

As the morning session moved toward the lunch break, Washington Sundar and debutant Manav Suthar occupied the crease with India at 475 for six. Their shared task: to extend the total as far as possible without recklessness, to give India’s first innings a final shape that sets up a declaration with both maximum lead and maximum time to bowl Afghanistan out twice.

For Suthar, on the first day of his Test career and now batting at number nine with India in a position of comfort, it is precisely the low-pressure scenario in which a debut innings can produce a meaningful score. The bowling attack is limited. The total is large. Washington Sundar as his partner brings experience and technique. Whatever runs Suthar adds will carry personal significance and may add to the evidence base that his selection represents a long-term investment rather than a one-match opportunity.

Conclusion: 81, a Hundred Short of History

Rishabh Pant walks off with 81 runs, two reprieves unused, a 169-run partnership concluded, and the hundred that would have been the cleanest possible statement of his return to form sitting unclaimed in the space between what happened and what might have.

The wild slog that ended his innings was not a departure from his character. It was an expression of it. Piyush Chawla, analyzing his Day 1 innings, noted the precise way Pant plays with field settings and chooses his moments. On the morning of Day 2, with the total already imposing and the match already settled, he chose a moment that did not justify the choice. The ball was spliced. The fielder caught it. The hundred did not happen.

Whether that represents a failure of discipline or simply the natural consequence of the way Pant plays cricket, a way that has produced some of the most extraordinary Test innings of the modern era, is a question that has followed him since his debut. The answer, like so much about Rishabh Pant, is probably both: that the thing that occasionally costs him a hundred is the same thing that occasionally produces something nobody else in world cricket could manage. Today the costs were modest. India are winning. The innings contributed what was needed.

Eighty-one runs. Nineteen short. The hundred will come another day. It always does, eventually, with Rishabh Pant, which is perhaps the most reassuring thing about him.