“Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
It’s been almost 18 months since Sunil Gavaskar’s Boxing Day outburst at the MCG, but on Wednesday night in Lucknow, those words resurfaced with an uncomfortable relevance. This time it wasn’t comments. These were the questions hanging over Rishabh Pant.
Because this wasn’t just another layoff. It felt like a familiar fault line in a career that has reached the highest peaks in Test cricket and yet continues to drift when the white ball demands a different kind of discipline.
LSG vs RR: HIGHLIGHTS | SCORECARD
The tension was already visible before the start of the post-match press conference. The room fell silent as the microphones flashed.
“Three consecutive losses at home. What is your honest assessment of why LSG can’t win in Lucknow?”
The question landed on Justin Langer without preamble. He paused, choosing his words carefully before admitting that his doughs didn’t conform to Ekana’s surface. There was enough pace and bounce for a convincing match, but not enough awareness from LSG on a night where two points got away too easily.
Three defeats in a row at home. Seventh in spot rebounding. And now, the 160 chase that never took shape.
Lucknow Super Giants find themselves trapped by what looks like an Ekana Bhool Bhulaiya. Combinations have been shuffled, roles changed, surfaces modified, but the result remains unchanged.
THREE BALLS, THREE SHOTS
Even in the press box, there was a sense of uneasiness after Rajasthan Royals’ restriction. The plan to contain Vaibhav Suryavanshi worked, but confidence in LSG’s pursuit was fragile at best. Their struggles with the bat have rarely allowed for optimism this season.
This uneasiness turned out to be justified.
LSG never got close to 160. It was a collective failure, but as is often the case, the early moments set the tone. The “play of the day” was not an act of brilliance, but a moment of disarray: Pant’s dismissal. The entire LSG batting unit cut a frustrated figure after the loss to RR. (PTI photo)
The chase got off to a poor start when Ayush Badoni was run out in the opening over after a mix-up with Mitchell Marsh. The inning was tied before it even started.
Then came Pant.
The warning signs were there from the beginning. He didn’t seem to want to take his time, instead wanting to impose himself immediately on Nandre Burger, who was working at a high tempo. It’s an approach that has served him well in the past. He has taken down fast bowlers of a much higher caliber, but here it felt out of sync with the demands of the surface.
He attacked his first delivery and looked to fire it over the infield. He was missing.
He tried again soon after, advancing once more, only to pull wrong as Burger adjusted his length.
And then came the decisive moment. Pant abandoned the attack, dropped to one knee and attempted to flick a cross to mid-wicket. The execution did not match the intention. A weak outside edge carried safely to Dhruv Jurel behind the stumps.
Three balls. Three wrong reads.
Pant batted as if the chase required urgency, as if the board read 260 and not 160. The intent was clear, but the judgment was not. Shot selection, poise and awareness deserted him in a passage that summed up LSG’s wider struggles.
Was it instinct or misreading the moment?
In any case, it was the release that shifted the tone of the chase. LSG needed calm from their captain. Instead, they got an error that left them chasing the game much sooner than they should have.
And again, these words did not seem out of place.
WHAT LANGER SAID
“I haven’t spoken to him (Rishab) yet but he wants to play with freedom. That’s how he plays all his cricket – he’s very instinctive,” Langer said after LSG were bowled out for just 119 in 18 overs. Mitchell Marsh waged a lone battle with a fifty, but hara-kiri at the top of the order meant they never recovered from 11 for 3 on a pitch that required common sense and patience. Aiden Markram failed, Nicholas Pooran failed, but nobody threw it quite like Pant.
“He’s probably feeling the pinch as much as everybody and he’s in that key position at number three. He came out very aggressively against Punjab – he needed to because we were chasing 250 – but I think that’s the style of cricket he wants to play. He’ll be as frustrated as anyone that it didn’t work out today.”
I mean, instinctive. Or instinctive to a fault?
After all, Justin Langer is no stranger to watching Rishabh Pant at his most brash. He watched from the opposition dressing room as Pant became the epitome of modern fearlessness and dismantled Australia’s Gabba fortress. That unbeaten 89 remains one of the defining knocks of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2021, a performance that cemented his reputation as a cricketer unafraid of moments and consequences.
This version of the Pant won admiration across locker rooms, including Langer’s.
TOO MUCH PRESSURE ON PANTS?
But in the years since, particularly in white-ball cricket, the returns have not matched the reputation. Which begs a more vexing question: is it the instinct that defines him, or the same instinct that now undermines him?
Swipe didn’t reflect calculated aggression on Wednesday. It was a shot played out of proportion to the situation or the surface, and it sat awkwardly with Langer’s “supporting instincts” defense. This was not an instinct refined by awareness; it was an impulse unchecked.
Riyan Parag actually offered a clue much earlier. While tossing, he talked about slowing down Ekan’s surface in the second innings, a lesson learned from his recent experience here during the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy with Assam. It was a small detail, but an important one.
This was never a typical T20 surface. As Langer later suggested, it resembled India’s version of the WACA: offering pace and bounce but not the height that allowed the batsmen to dominate without discretion.
Ravindra Jadeja showed what this discretion looks like. His 43 wasn’t built on dominance, but judgment. He absorbed the pressure early, running hard between the wickets and picking moments before stepping up late on as he took 20 off the final over to take the total to 159.
The method was clear. There was no room for error.
Did Pant miss the signs? Or did he just choose to ignore them? Others, including Vaibhav Suryavanshi, have already gone down trying to cross punches too soon. The pattern was visible. However, the remedy never came.
Later, there was a telling moment when Pant thanked commentator Simon Doull for handling him during the post-match interaction. It was said lightly, but it carried the weight of consciousness. Pant knew he had made a mistake.
Mistakes are inevitable. Repetitions are where they begin to define players.
For someone with Pant’s experience, therein lies the concern. He’s no newcomer to tinkering with formats. With over 200 T20 appearances and almost a decade in the IPL, he needed to improve.
His absence from India’s limited-overs sides over the last two years reflects a wider inconsistency. His last T20I appearance came in 2024 and he has not appeared in ODIs since August of that year.
DID LSG INVENT THE PROBLEM?
Which leads to a deeper question. Is Pant pushing too hard to let the game get to him? The weight of expectation cannot be neglected either. The Rs 27 crore price tag has its own pressure, especially as the team reshaped the previously set top order to suit it.
This top order was once among the most productive in the league. Mitchell Marsh and Aiden Markram combined for 574 runs last season, while Nicholas Pooran added over 500 at No. 3. It was a formation that offered both stability and firepower.
Now it seems unbalanced.
The changes raise clear questions. Why break a pairing that worked? Was it to create space for Pant at No.3, or a reaction to Pooran’s dip in form after his retirement from international cricket? More fundamentally, why are the team’s most reliable hitters no longer occupying their most influential positions?
Langer offered a measured explanation.
“We just felt at the start of the season that we knew they could do it, but because it worked last year it doesn’t necessarily mean it will work this year. Aiden is a very dedicated player and we felt early on that we needed cricketing intelligence in the middle. With Nicky and Aiden, two of our most experienced players, it’s often the hardest place to bat in T20 cricket, why we’ve got so much cricket behind us.” it.”
He can be there. But at this point, that thinking has yet to translate into clarity on the field.
It feels more and more like a party caught between ideas. Either the management is thinking about the problem or the players are not thinking enough in the moments that matter.
At this stage of his career, Rishabh Pant is expected to be the linchpin around which this batting line-up settles, not the variable that unsettles it. Leadership in this format is as much about judgment as it is about intent.
If Lucknow Super Giants are to find a way out of their home rut, that clarity needs to start with their captain. Playing with freedom has never meant playing without responsibility.
On the surface asking questions, Pant chose to answer too soon. And in doing so, he not only threw away his wicket but set the tone for another night where Lucknow lost their way.
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– The end
Issued by:
Debodinna Chakraborty
Published on:
23 Apr 2026 07:41 IST
