Rishabh Pant, who made his name as one of the most talented batters in modern cricket and took the headlines after being sold to the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) for the record amount of INR 27 crore, has been in a slump for around a couple of years now.
During a recent interview with the Times of India (TOI), former Team India captain Sourav Ganguly opened up about Rishabh Pant’s recent downfall.
Rishabh Pant has been struggling as the captain of LSG
For two consecutive seasons, the keeper-batter played in the Indian Premier League (IPL) as the captain of the Lucknow Super Giants. As the captain of the team, he has yet to achieve success. Notably, his individual performance also witnessed a significant drop in IPL 2025 and then in IPL 2026.
The form of Rishabh Pant might have also affected the team’s performance as well. Additionally, repeated injuries on multiple occasions put his hard-earned momentum to a halt.
Captaincy and leadership roles come with extra pressure. Some of the cricketers can flourish with the extra added burden, while some of the cricketers find it very hard to balance two different profiles, one is captaincy, and the other is individual performance. In Rishabh Pant’s case, he looked far from his best in IPL after being appointed as the captain of LSG.
So far, Pant has served LSG as the captain for the 2025 and 2026 seasons. In these two seasons, under his leadership, the team played 28 matches in total. In these 28 games, Pant led the team to 10 wins and 18 defeats, resulting in a win percentage of roughly 35.7%. In 2025, Lucknow finished 7th, and in this season, they finished their campaign as the tenth team in the 10-team league points table.
Pant's individual batting stats also deteriorated
If we talk about Rishabh’s individual performance with the bat, then the southpaw got 269 runs for an average of 24.45 in the previous season, while in 2026, his batting average was 28.36 as he scored 312 runs in 13 innings.
In total, the keeper-batter has scored 3865 runs throughout his IPL career from 136 innings, which has made his overall average 33.60, which is higher than his past two seasons' batting averages.
Sourav Ganguly explains why Pant is struggling
Sourav Ganguly emphasized that Rishabh Pant is a very good Test player and immensely talented, but somehow, he is yet to learn how to manage the extra pressure of captaincy.
“He’s a very good Test player. His Test match batting is world-class. He’s still finding it tough to adapt to T20 cricket. I hope he does because he’s got enormous talent. Captaincy is a burden on everyone. It’s how you handle it. But then you want to be captain, don’t you? You want to be captain because it’s a huge honour. So you will have to get that balance right. You do it, or somebody else will,” Sourav Ganguly told TOI in the interview.
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