Good sport: Rishabh Pant turns 'baby-sitter' for Tim Paine's young children

'Can you babysit? I'll take the wife to the movies one night and you'll look after the kids,' the Aussie skipper Tim Paine, was heard on the stump mic

Who: From baby of the side to “best babysitter”, Rishabh Pant is Indian cricket’s man of the moment. The 21-year-old wicket-keeper, seen as heir to the legendary M S Dhoni, got a chance to demonstrate his babysitting — and diplomatic — skills when the Indian and Australian Test sides met with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Sydney earlier this week.

What: Bonnie Paine, wife of Australian captain Tim Paine, posted a photo of herself, her two young children and Pant on her Instagram account. She tagged Pant, who posed with one of the kids in his arms, with the caption: “Best babysitter”. Pant’s gesture followed good old-fashioned banter between him and Paine during the ongoing series.

During the third Test match in Melbourne, Paine, also a wicket-keeper, had sledged Pant suggesting he would lose his place and make way for Dhoni when the one-day leg of the tour kicks off. The Tasmanian also offered to draft Pant into the T20 team, Hobart Hurricanes, for the Big Bash League. “Can you babysit? I’ll take the wife to the movies one night and you’ll look after the kids,” the Aussie skipper was heard on the stump mic. The joke wasn’t lost on Pant, who was heard the next day telling his teammate: “We got a special guest today. Have you ever heard of a temporary captain, ever, Mayank?”

The photo shot up the number of followers on Bonnie Paine’s profile. Pant won hearts and Amul was typically on point with an ad showing the cricketer with the babies and the tagline, “Child’s play for Pant!”

Where: The rise of the Indian team, first emerging as a challenger to the all-conquering Australian team led by Steve Waugh and now enjoying the upper hand against an opposition on the wane, has thrown up some epic contests between bat and ball as well as some unsavoury moments. Fans will recall the infamous “Monkeygate” scandal during the Sydney Test of 2008, when off-spinner Harbhajan Singh was accused of hurling racial taunts at Andrew Symonds by the Australians. It strained ties between the two teams and India lost the match that is also remembered for umpiring blunders and frosty behaviour from the Aussies.

How: Australian cricketers have been involved in some of the nastiest incidents of sledging. Glenn McGrath versus Ramnaresh Sarwan in Antigua, 2003, and Waugh versus Curtly Ambrose in Trinidad, 1995, are two instances where the men nearly came to blows after unprintable utterances from the tourists rubbed the West Indians the wrong way. As the Australian team rose to pre-eminence at the turn of the last century, the boundaries of the imaginary line that the cricketers promised never to cross kept getting blurred. The penny dropped after a ball-tampering row in the Cape Town Test last year resulted in a purge involving some of Cricket Australia's biggest names, an impassioned and angry response from a public that had had enough and opprobrium on a team that the cricketing world had for long loved to hate. Now, even as a depleted home Test team stares at a historic first-ever series defeat to India, the Pant-Paine episode will only reassure everyone of Australia's new embrace of fair play. And that Pant, babysitter, is a good sport.