Rishabh Pant needed five balls to commit to the shot that ended his stay in the middle, on the second day of India’s tour match against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI at the Nondescripts Cricket Club Ground in Colombo. He charged off-spinner Ramesh Mendis with a fielder posted inside the long-off boundary. The ball was close enough to tempt exactly the shot Pant played. He didn’t clear the fielder. KL Rahul had gone before him, bowled attempting a big slog-sweep off the off-spin of Kesara Nuwantha after progressing serenely to 40, missing the ball completely. Yashasvi Jaiswal was dismissed on the second ball, steering Vishwa Fernando to a fielder for a duck.
India would have hoped Pant and Dhruv Jurel got among the runs too on an easy-paced pitch; Pant fell to his own urges, and Jurel to his own limitations. Jurel lasted a touch longer without ever looking settled, until a ball that kicked up waist-high while turning in required soft hands. Jurel didn’t. He can be all-arms as a batsman, and he clipped it uppishly to short leg, where Nipun Dhananjaya took the second grab, diving forward. All three fell to spin on a pitch offering turn without much venom. It left the day to a batsman in the XI only because someone else was unfit.
Devdutt Padikkal came in at No.3, standing in for the unfit Sai Sudharsan, with Shubman Gill also out after picking up an injury at training. His last Test innings for India had come in Perth, in the Border-Gavaskar series of 2024. By the time he had retired once after reaching his hundred and returned later to bat on, news had come through that Sudharsan was ruled out of the Test series through injury. Padikkal would be India’s No.3 in the Test that starts on the 15th.
There has been talk in the Indian camp of using the feet more and combining it with the sweep to handle Sri Lanka’s spin. Both are sound methods, but they need the ball to cooperate, and Jurel’s didn’t: not flighted enough to use the feet, not there for the sweep. Ravindra Jadeja alone looked entirely at ease against it, flowing quietly as he does, showing the right shot for every ball, before retiring for others to have a turn once he’d taken his innings to 63.
The day’s other, larger story was Padikkal’s innings. He was batting as much to settle the question of the No.3 spot as to make runs.
Compact batting
Compact describes his batting. He bats from the middle, sometimes middle-and-off, guard, close enough to the line that he should naturally be getting behind deliveries around off stump. He manages to somehow stay beside it instead. He doesn’t move much across to get behind the ball; he bends the knees, then either punches through the off side or stretches forward to drive. He can occasionally stab at balls that leave him late, but there wasn’t much seam movement on offer today to test that outside edge.
He began carefully against the new ball, leaving anything wide of off from Vishwa Fernando, and took ten balls to get off the mark. The fifty came up in 61 balls and six fours, built mostly off the back foot, punching seamers through point when they dropped short and working the spinners through the on side rather than reaching for them.
Past fifty, at 79, he broke that pattern once: a short ball from Vishwa Fernando that he pulled with both feet off the ground, wrists doing all the work his feet hadn’t had time to, timed well enough to beat long leg to the fence. The hundred took another 60 balls. There was a leading edge that dropped just short of Mendis at mid-on, and a top edge off a Lahiru Kumara bouncer that clipped his helmet and brought the physio out for a concussion check before he carried on.
He reached three figures with a pulled four off Mendis, 103 off 121 balls with fourteen boundaries, and kept going rather than settling for it.