Rahul Dravid expects Rishabh Pant to be an important player for India in the near future

Rahul Dravid expects Rishabh Pant to be an important player for India in the near future

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BCCI

Rahul Dravid has remarked that Rishabh Pant can become an important player for India in the future, based on the youngster’s courage in overcoming the tragedy of losing his father. Dravid also added that inexperience of the Delhi Daredevils was the major reason for the team’s poor show in the IPL.

Pant, who lost his father just a couple of days before Delhi Daredevils’ first match of the IPL 2017, shone brightly with the bat for the major part of the league and scored 366 runs in 14 innings at a strike-rate of 165.61. He also established himself as a big hitter, having smashed 24 sixes, only behind Glenn Maxwell and David Warner. Dravid acknowledged the contribution of the Delhi lad and said that hoped that he would go on to become an important member of the Indian cricket team.

“It was a difficult time for Rishabh at the start of the tournament. His father had passed away, so that shows the mental strength of the player to come back from that and perform consistently the way he did. There is the expectation that he will go on and be an important player for India,” Dravid said, reported PTI. 

Against RCB, while wickets were tumbling at the other end, Pant kept his calm to keep his side in the run chase. Even though he was not able to see his side through to the win, it was a performance of a player who was confident in his own abilities. He has shown glimpses of his immense talent time and again, be it the 57 against RCB or the incredible 97 against GL, but these performances were followed by single digit scores. Dravid acknowledged that the youngsters should learn to have consistency in their performance. 

“Rishabh has played very well in this tournament. All of our young players have played well in this year’s tournament but consistency is one thing they’ll have to learn going forward. I can surely say that the ability and talent is there, everyone has shown it. Rishabh has shown it in this tournament by playing some very good innings,” Dravid added.

Even before the tournament began JP Duminy (personal reasons) and Quinton de Kock (injury) ruled themselves out of the tournament and it was up to the Indian youngsters to swim or sink from thereon. Although they did perform well, they failed to close out the close contests, stumbling at the fag end, more often than not and Dravid feels that had been the team’s undoing. 

“Obviously, we are very disappointed by the season gone by. At the start, we had expectations of qualifying (for playoffs) but that didn’t happen. There were many games in the middle period of the tournament which were quite close but we couldn’t win those and obviously, that puts pressure on you if you don’t win those close games,” the former Indian skipper said.

"Few of the changes were obviously forced due to injuries, sometimes you do make tactical changes as well when people are not in form, so it's hard to assess. Each and every game was different. That's not really an excuse.

"I believe we had the squad and the players to make up for that. I think the team was really good, maybe a little bit inexperienced in the batting because of the injuries early on but I still think we had the ability and a lot of opportunities in a lot of games."

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