Rohit Sharma said India wanted to be "extra careful" when it came to Rishabh Pant's knees - on which he has had major surgeries after a life-threatening car accident - and that was the reason for keeping him off the field after he picked up a knock on his right knee during New Zealand's first innings.
"He's had a massive operation on his leg, so we all know what he went through," Rohit said after India went down by eight wickets to New Zealand in Bengaluru on Sunday. "It's just to be a little careful about where he is at and what he is to us. Even when he was batting, he was not comfortably running. He was trying to only put the ball in the stands."
Pant hurt the knee on the second day of the Test when he was attempting to stump Devon Conway in the 37th over of the New Zealand innings. He failed to collect the ball, which hit him. Pant winced in pain and went off the field straightaway. Dhruv Jurel took the gloves from Pant and kept for the rest of the first innings and the 27.4 overs of New Zealand's second innings.
On the fourth day, Pant came out to bat in India's second innings and scored 99 off 105 balls batting for more than three hours, though he was at times struggling to run.
It's only been six months since Pant's comeback after being away from competitive cricket for close to a year-and-a-half following the car crash in December 2022. He made a return to competitive cricket in IPL 2024, and then to international cricket at the T20 World Cup. The two-Test series against Bangladesh late last month was his first in the format in close to two years.
"He's had a lot of minor surgeries [and] one big surgery on his knee and he went through a lot of trauma, to be honest, in the last one-and-a-half years," Rohit said. "So it's just about being extra careful, not [just] careful with him.
"When you're keeping, you have to bend every ball with your knee going down and the wicket being what it was, we thought it is the right thing to do for him to stay inside and then get 100% ready for the next one."
While batting, though, Pant was his usual self, smashing nine fours and five sixes, one of which went 107 metres long and out of the M Chinnaswamy Stadium.
"No one knows what goes in his mind, to be honest," Rohit said with a smile. "He decides what he wants to do. I don't think there's anything that you need to speak to him [about]. We spoke to him about 'please understand the situation' and stuff like that, but that's Rishabh - he wants to play in a certain way and then, as a captain, as a coach, we want to back that because like he has produced results for us having that mindset. So let him go and play freely."