Rishabh Pant’s dreadful IPL 2025 campaign got worse on Monday night with a double whammy. His Lucknow Super Giants side were bundled out of playoff contention following loss to Sunrisers Hyderabad and to top it all off, Pant failed to fire with the bat again.The under-pressure LSG captain promoted himself to No. 3 spot in the must-win game. He joined Aiden Markram in the middle after the fall of Mitchell Marsh, who had put together a century-plus stand.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Pant started brightly – hitting a four off Eshan Malinga on the fifth ball of the 12th over. Next ball, however, was curtains for him.
Pant leaned forward to a delivery that pitched on middle and off, the ball hit the toe end of the bat and was plucked sensationally by Malinga who stretched to his left.With his 7 runs from 6 balls, Pant took his tally to 135 runs from 12 matches at an average of 12.27 and a strike rate of 100. With two matches to go, LSG’s Rs 27 crore buy is on course for his worst IPL season.Upon Pant’s exit, a visibly upset LSG owner Sanjiv Goenka turned and walked back to a room from the balcony in disappointment.As things stand, Pant’s returns this season have been 5 runs per crore spent by the franchise.Following the six-wicket loss, Pant admitted that the absence of key players, especially bowlers, due to injuries was a big factor in them being knocked out from reckoning of a top-four finish.LSG began the IPL with injuries to Mohsin Khan, Avesh Khan, Akash Deep and Mayank Yadav.“Definitely it could have been one of our best seasons but coming into the tournament we had a lot of gaps, injuries and as a team we decided to not talk about that, but it became difficult to fill those gaps for us,” Pant told the broadcaster after their loss to SRH here.The franchise did sign Shardul Thakur mid-way into IPL 2025 and the likes of Avesh and Akash returned, Mayank could only feature in a couple of games before being ruled out due to an injury again.“The way we planned the auction, if we would have had the same bowling.. but this is cricket, sometimes things go your way and sometimes they don’t, we take pride in the way we played and take the positives from the season than the negative side.”“We have a strong batting line up, have enough firepower and that is the biggest positive for the season,” added Pant.
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