Rishabh Pant or Harry Brook - who is the best Test batter in the world at present?
The one similarity that both Rishabh Pant and Harry Brook exhibit is that if you live by the sword, you die by it too. The two torchbearers of the next generation of batters in Test cricket, like to dominate proceedings more than they allow the opposition to dominate them. In the process, they end up creating moments of sheer genius.
While Pant is a southpaw, Brook is a conventional right-handed batter who goes about his business as if he is unbothered by anything else revolving outside the oval where he happens to have turned up to put wood on leather. The same goes for Pant but with the added responsibility of donning the wicketkeeping gloves.
While it may have seemed at the beginning of his international career that the big gloves were proving to be too heavy to bear for the happy-go-lucky cricketer from Sonnet, Delhi, he has improved considerably over the years, thanks to working with former Hyderabad spinner and India fielding coach R Sridhar, among others.
Brook, on the other hand, has been phenomenal with the bat right from the start of his career and tumbled down the accepted norms of batting in his home country. Pant, too, has rarely faltered with the bat in hand, and continually showcased his willingness to take one for the team and move forward.
Statistics do not do justice to the joy these two cricketers have given to aficionados of the sport across the world. But for the sake of the numbers that make our game what it is, we must get them out of the way. It may seem too banal a task for so artistic a profession, but keep count we must.
Pant has amassed 2780 runs in 40 Tests at an average of 42.76 while Brook has walloped his way to 2280 runs in 23 matches at an impressive average of 61.62. Pant has six centuries and 14 half-centuries to his name while Brook has bagged eight tons and 10 half-tons in his career.
Rishabh Pant recovered from a life-threatening road accident
Pant is older than Brook by a couple of years, and is also tasked with wicketkeeping, which is a tedious job for an Indian to do, especially in home conditions against the likes of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. However, he has managed both equally well - a testament to his sheer will.
What is astonishing about Pant is that a couple of years ago, very few cricket fans thought they would ever see him back on a field. He met with a serious road accident while on his way to Roorkee from Delhi and spent the best part of a year and a half recovering from it.
That he made a comeback from that accident and played a vital role for India in their T20 World Cup triumph in the West Indies and the USA speaks largely about the grit that Pant has inside him. Sheerly, for this reason, Pant is miles ahead of any other cricketer he comes up in comparison with.
Yet, Brook's claim to fame is equally pressing and cannot be discounted. It is, of course, not his fault that he did not meet with an accident himself which he could recover from to gain the sympathy of the world and push the restart button on his cricket career. The Yorkshireman has played the strings as Nature decreed.
Harry Brook has been in phenomenal form of late
If one were to go by recent form, there is no denying that Brook is miles ahead of Pant. In the three Test innings he has played so far in New Zealand, he has scored 171, 123, and 55. Earlier this year in Pakistan, he bagged his highest Test score, 317 against the hosts in the first Test in Multan.
Pant, on the other hand, did decently for the Indians in their disastrous 0-3 series loss at home to New Zealand and scored 20, 99, 18, 0, 6,0, and 64. This was preceded by a 109 scored against Bangladesh in Chennai. However, in the ongoing Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia, Pant has not fired yet.
In the four innings he has played so far in the Test series, the wicketkeeper-batter has scored 37, 1, 27, and 28. Although he got starts in three out of the four innings, he could not quite convert them into big scores. The last two must have been extremely painful to him given that India lost the Test by 10 wickets.
Pant has re-written history books with the comeback he made into cricket following his life-threatening accident, but if numbers were to be our sole guide, Brook wins the day. Numbers, however, do not often tell the full story, and in matters of art, craft, and beauty, the heart must always take precedence.