Lack of a ‘perfect 40 overs’ hurt LSG this season, says Pant after ending their season with defeat against RCB.
LSG have suffered from a lack of ’40 overs of good cricket’ all season.
As he advanced to 118 not out off 61 balls against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) in the season’s last league game, Rishabh Pant was intent on building on his strong start, something he had failed to achieve in the previous IPL 2025 games. However, after scoring 227, the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) lost the game, which Pant attributed to their inability to play “40 overs of good cricket”.
“Definitely, I was feeling well with each and every match”, Pant said on the broadcast after the match. “But sometimes, it just doesn’t come off. But today, I made sure that if I’m starting well, I should make a big one, like all the experienced players do; learning from the best always – whenever you get a start, try to make it [as] big as possible.”
With just 151 runs in 12 innings going into the game, Pant’s batting performance this season has been lacklustre. He claimed that, in contrast to previously in the season, he deliberately chose to hit straight.
“I was trying to play the field, how they were going to bowl on this wicket, so definitely that [hitting straight] was something I kept in mind,” he said. “Just playing through the line, just looking for the gaps, kept it very simple, and played every ball with the same intensity throughout the innings.”
113 runs were scored in seven overs by Will O’Rourke and Shahbaz Ahmed, eliminating LSG’s inexperienced bowling attack. LSG lost the lead they had going into the chase due to a combination of unforced fielding errors and a back-foot no-ball from Digvesh Rathi that gave Player-of-the-Match Jitesh Sharma a life.
“Eventually, you have to play 40 overs of good cricket, 20 overs will definitely not save you in a T20 game, and that’s been our story,” Pant said. “There were lot of injury concerns before the tournament, you can see that that is something that hurt us going through the season.”
LSG finished seventh on the points table with six wins in 14 games. Pant did note positives with the ball but conceded that they let games slip.
“There have been some special bowling performances also,” he said. “Digvesh Rathi is one of them, Avesh [Khan] bowled some crucial overs. Akash Singh and Akash Deep also did. Like I said, we have been getting chances, but we wouldn’t be [weren’t] able to maintain it for a longer period of time and that is just costing us the match.”