Five years ago - has it really been that long? - Rishabh Pant walked in on day two of a Chennai Test with India four down and trailing England by more than 500 runs. He had faced 11 balls when Jack Leach came into the attack, with a vast, scarred area of footmarks to aim at outside the left-hand batter's off stump.
This is one of the classic problems of Test cricket. It's a two-end sport where contests span multiple days, and right-arm over is the predominant angle of bowling. The geometry of this usually means there are rough patches outside the left-hander's off stump when a match has gone on for long enough. Left-arm orthodox spinners are best placed to exploit these patches.
Thousands of batters have faced this problem throughout Test history. Hundreds have done so with their team battling massive deficits. It's hard to say if anyone else has attempted to solve it the way Pant did. Even as England packed the on-side boundary, he committed himself to stepping out, getting as close to the pitch of the ball as possible, and trying to smash it out of the park, again and again and again.
Leach bowled five overs while Pant was at the crease, split into two spells. Pant scored 48 runs off him, facing 21 balls and hitting five of them over the boundary.
This was audacious and possibly unprecedented, and it was also coldly logical if you unlearned all the years of received wisdom you had imbibed from watching Test cricket. Pant is such a gifted six-hitter, and has such ironclad belief in his ability to hit sixes, that he backed himself to hit the opposition's most dangerous bowler in those conditions out of the attack. He certainly backed his six-hitting above his ability to survive a long spell from Leach by conventional means.
To have backed that plan and succeeded in one innings is one thing. To have batted in this manner and scored over 3600 runs at an average close to 44 in an era of deep bowling attacks and result pitches, while having scored six of his eight hundreds in Australia, England and South Africa, while being a specialist wicketkeeper? There's a six-letter word beginning with G and ending with S that sums it up.
On Tuesday, Pant hit his 100th six in Test cricket, during the course of a typically Pantian innings against Sri Lanka in Galle. It was typically Pantian for the obvious reason that it was breezy and entertaining and full of inventive shots that went to unexpected parts of the ground. It was also typically Pantian because he scored 66 off 69 balls while the rest of India's batters and extras made 46 for 6 in 99 balls from the time he came to the crease.
This is a batter of unique methods that sit on the knife edge of possibility. Succeed, as they have often done, and they open up breathtaking possibilities. Fail, as they have done less often but often enough to remember, and they open themselves up to ridicule and disgust. Nothing in all our years of watching Test cricket has prepared us for Rishabh Pant, and even our years of watching Rishabh Pant have helped only so much in understanding him.
In the first innings in Galle, Pant was out trying to launch an offspinner for six in the first over after Sri Lanka took the second new ball. It may have seemed unnecessary to many of us, but what do we know? Even Pant's most substantial innings have included charges down the pitch off fast bowlers in his first three or four balls at the crease. He has continued to bat the same way in some innings, and withdrawn into more sedate patterns of play in others, and those early risks have either faded from memory or became part of spectacular tapestries of risk-taking. But we vividly remember each occasion on which he has taken risks at what have seemed inopportune moments, when they haven't come off.
Now, in the second innings, with a lead to be extended and weather and time looming as potential issues, India needed Pant to be Pant. And Sri Lanka came out with smart plans and executed them admirably. The fast bowlers set short-ball fields and dug it in. The spinners found sharp turn and set fields that dissuaded down-the-ground hits.
Pant responded exactly as you would expect. He brought out the reverse-sweep frequently and played it with precision. He dealt with the short balls with two contrasting plans. One was to step out, make room, and create opportunities to hit down the ground. He charged Lahiru Kumara, got reasonably close to the pitch of the ball, and launched it out of the ground. He charged Asitha Fernando, got nowhere near the pitch of the ball, and flat-batted it through mid-off while swivelling through his hips with enough force to lift his back leg off the ground.
The other plan took Pant's body in the opposite direction: he did not step back and across as much as fall back and across, with the intent to pull or help the ball into the arc between fine leg and deep square leg. Kumara dealt Pant a blow to his helmet via his shoulder, and eventually dismissed him, caught behind gloving one of these falling pulls, but the contest yielded 23 runs off 15 balls.
Those runs included a momentous hit over a leaping deep-backward-square-leg fielder that took Pant from 47 to 53, and from 99 sixes in Test cricket to 100. The shot will live long in the memory for its mechanics too, for the manipulation of line and the unorthodox use of limbs. Pant often hits one-handed sixes that are all top hand; this one was entirely bottom hand.
The shot moved Pant into a club with only three other members. Ben Stokes, Brendon McCullum and Adam Gilchrist hit their 100th sixes off the 9042nd, 9756th and 6578th balls they faced in Test cricket. Pant got there in 4918 balls.
Pant has scored 600 of his 3662 Test runs in sixes. That's nearly a sixth of his runs. Of all other batters to have hit 50 Test sixes, only Tim Southee and Shahid Afridi have scored a bigger percentage of their runs via sixes. Southee was a lower-order biffer and Afridi a one-of-a-kind hitter who should probably have played more Tests than he did, given his record. Neither, however, came close to being what Pant is: one of the foremost middle-order batters of his time and a near-certainty in his country's all-time Test XI for his batting feats.
Six-hitting, in short, has been central to Pant's career in a way that is unprecedented in Test cricket. And it's hard to see it becoming a template for future Test cricketers even as batters become more proficient at hitting sixes through T20 training. You can train yourself to hit a wide range of lines and lengths for six, but you'll also need other skills to make six-hitting a central part of a successful Test repertoire. You'll need a head for calculation to know whom to attack and when, given the conditions and match situation. You'll need a defensive game to survive testing periods. And you'll need to be able to back yourself through success and failure and the pendulum swings of public opinion.
Pant has all these things in abundant measure. They've allowed him to take the high-wire act of six-hitting and turn it into an instrument of logic, and a foundational element of a great career. His methods shouldn't work, but he's made them work all over the world and against all kinds of bowling while we've watched in awe and dread, unable to make any sense of what we're witnessing.