Only Rahul Dravid, KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant have scored ODI centuries outside Asia among Indian wicket keepers.
You can clearly see that both KL Rahul and Rahul Dravid are batters first and wicket keepers second as you need a lot of batting ability to be able to score a century outside Asia, even in ODI cricket.
Rishabh Pant is the first proper wicket-keeper batter from India to score an ODI century outside Asia, which is a feat in itself. Pant reached the landmark when he struck an unbeaten 125 against England in the third ODI.
Former cricketer and analyst Sanjay Manjrekar was all praise for the Indian wicket-keeper.
"Thanks to Rishabh Pant for staying there till the end in the 3rd ODI against England. In fact, both Pant and Pandya are high-quality batters, and they're going to be batting mostly at number 4 and 5 whether it's T20 Cricket or 50 overs cricket or Pant could be opening as well. In 2019, we had a lot of issues finding a proper middle order but now we have some quality supply."
"Pant may seem irresponsible sometimes when he gets out, when he gets out playing one of those kinds of shots, we've got to look at it as somebody getting out at slips because the game has changed and that is Rishabh Pant's primary sort of skill. He's got to sound different but when he extends himself, he tries these shots. The winning runs for example, it's a part of his basic attacking array of shots that he has. So, responsibility wise I think this guy is just incredible because of the kind of record he has in test cricket."
The series was locked at 1-1 going into the final one-day international at the Old Trafford in Manchester, and Indian needed to produce something extraordinary.
Tottering at 72 for 4 in pursuit of 260, India could have found themselves in deep trouble had Rishabh Pant and Hardik Pandya not joined hands. The young and dynamic duo played the situation very calmly and took India to a win with almost 8 overs remaining as the team won by 5 wickets to take both the match and the series.
