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Rishabh Pant looked like he had turned a bit of a corner in the last IPL 2026 game, where he scored 43 in 23 balls as Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) were set 255 for victory against Punjab Kings (PBKS) but fell 54 short. But come Wednesday, and Pant was back to swishing, nicking, and falling for a three-ball duck as LSG lost again, for the fifth time in seven matches this season, this time to Rajasthan Royals (RR). Dale Steyn put the poor run down to Pant playing “more than one game in his head right now” – trying to play his own game and also trying to do what captains like Shreyas Iyer and Rajat Patidar have been doing.
Pant had a good hit in LSG’s second game of the season, scoring 68 not out in 50 balls in a win over Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) in a low-scoring game. But apart from that and the 43 against PBKS, he has a top score of 18 and a tally of 147 runs overall at a strike rate of 132.43 from seven innings.
“He wants to play with freedom. We see how he plays all his cricket – he’s very instinctive. He’s probably feeling the pinch as much as everyone [else in the team is],” Justin Langer, the LSG head coach, said after the loss to RR. “He’s in that pivotal position at No. 3. He came out very aggressively against Punjab. He needed to because we were chasing 250 [255], but I think that’s the style of cricket he wants to play, and he’ll be as frustrated as anyone that it didn’t come off today.”
It hasn’t come off more often than it has of late, and on ESPNcricinfo’s TimeOut show after the game, the consensus was that he was firstly unclear about the best way to bat.
“You look at innings like that – who can we look who does that well? So how many times out of ten if you put Virat Kohli in that situation is he going to play in a tempo that’s going to be: I’m not going to face dot balls; I’m going to hit the ball along the ground; I’m going to be 60 not out… and that’s a picture for you on tough wickets when the scoreboard is saying [the target is] 160,” Faf du Plessis said. “How do you get to the end? Look at [Kohli] – he is a great example. High intensity. Drops the risk a little bit. Hits gaps, hits fours, runs really hard, no dot balls. That is a very modern way of playing. It’s a default of our game is right now.”
Captains like Iyer (208 runs in five innings at a strike rate of 182.45) and Patidar (230 in six innings at 212.96) have raised the bar and Pant was struggling to keep up, du Plessis suggested.
“A lot of teams are talking about how you must be aggressive, how you must take the game on. And, as a captain, you feel that responsibility lies with you to demonstrate that,” du Plessis said. “Great examples: Rajat Patidar is leading the way that the RCB batting line-up’s playing, and Shreyas Iyer is leading the way [with] the style of batting [for PBKS].
“So the captain sets the tone. You almost can’t blame Pant [for] thinking ‘I need to do the same’. But tonight it wasn’t there; tonight you needed just a calm head, just to go… The wicket was tough and ‘I need to scratch my way to the end of the game’.”
Speaking on the same programme, Saba Karim said that Pant hadn’t quite worked out his white-ball game despite playing domestic and IPL cricket since 2015-16, and the reason was lack of clarity.
“A modern T20 batter has to find his own template. For instance, whether it is Shreyas Iyer or Rajat Patidar, even if Rajat Patidar goes in to bat on a track like this, I’m sure he’s got his clarity in his mind that he will go and play the big shots, and he’s confident of doing so,” Karim said. “Rishabh Pant’s problem lies in the fact that he’s yet to find his template for white-ball cricket. And not only talking about T20, even ODIs. And Test-match batting for him, I think there is more transparency in his thought process the way he prepares. I think somehow in white-ball cricket he’s yet to find that.”
If runs and strike rates were the yardstick, Pant has been there before in the IPL. In 2017, he scored 366 runs at a strike rate of 165.61. That went up to 684 at 173.60 in 2018. He has never topped those numbers in an IPL season, but has crossed 400 runs for a season three other times. LSG need that Pant to make an appearance fast, and not the one that scored 269 runs in 14 innings at a strike rate of 133.17 last season, which is roughly where this season is at the moment for him.
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