Securing a place in Indian team has become one of the biggest challenges in modern-day cricket. With the ever-growing competition for spots, leading batters such as Shubman Gill, Rinku Singh and KL Rahul failed to make the cut in India’s T20 World Cup 2024 squad.
In the past, many names have made scattered appearances but they are not in the selection contention anymore. One of them is Nitish Rana, who made his India debut during the white-ball tour to Sri Lanka in 2021.
The southpaw played two T20Is and one ODI on that tour and returned with a total of only 22 runs. Since then, he has been sidelined from the national set-up.
Understandably, Rana was left gutted with his poor showing and nearly three years later, the batter opened up his struggles with self-confidence following the series.
Rana also revealed how it was Rishabh Pant, the player’s teammate at Delhi and an established international cricketer by that time, who helped him gain confidence.
“I was selected for the tour of Sri Lanka. It was a pretty bad series for me. There was only one guy (Rishabh Pant) in the cricket circle who called me after that. We talked for 18 minutes. That phone call changed my life. When you reach where you wanted to reach, and then you fail, that feeling is different. No one wants to fail,” Rana said in an interview with podcaster Ranveer Allahbadia on his YouTube channel BeerBiceps.
“I never expected that to happen. I told myself that it would've been better if I hadn't been selected at all. Rishabh told me, 'it was your dream to wear this jersey since you picked up the bat for the first time. And you did that. You know what you did, but from here, how you see your life is up to you. You can either fall down or work and get up again. I won't tell you that, nor I will speak about this again'.”
The KKR batter was so much in self-doubt that he began to question whether he even deserved to represent India after the failure against Sri Lanka.
“When you fail, you start to doubt your talent and calibre. It happens with me. I was doubting myself a lot. I started to feel, did I not deserve this at all? But Rishabh helped me clear my doubts. We don't talk about cricket, but whenever we do, it is about picking the other up. And that's called friendship,” Rana remarked.
