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Cricket Players‘Remove Rishabh Pant as captain’: LSG face big call as IPL 2026 season unravels, told to take him ‘out of firing line’
Rishabh Pant only scored 204 runs in nine matches for LSG this season at a strike rate of 128.30.
It was just Wasim Jaffer a few days ago, but now it has turned into a chorus, with former cricketers Manoj Tiwary and Rohan Gavaskar echoing the same view. With Lucknow Super Giants’ IPL 2026 campaign all but over after their defeat to Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede Stadium on Monday, Tiwary and Gavaskar urged the franchise to take the tough call of removing Rishabh Pant as captain — allowing him to play freely as a batter and return to his destructive best in T20 cricket.
Pant joined the Lucknow franchise in 2025 and was named skipper by owner Sanjiv Goenka. However, he managed just 269 runs in 14 innings last season at an average of 24.45. That has improved only marginally this year, with 204 runs in nine matches, but at a far more concerning strike rate of 128.30, with just one fifty.
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Speaking to Cricbuzz, Tiwary and Gavaskar reckoned that the burden of captaincy has contributed to the dip in Pant’s batting.
“Sanjiv Goenka had once said in an interview that he wants Pant to create a legacy, play for LSG for the next 10–15 years and win trophies. But sometimes you’ve got to put certain players out of the firing line. After this season, LSG must decide whether they want to keep him as captain. He should be allowed to focus only on his batting, because we all know his capabilities and talent.
“When the team performs badly, that pressure also falls on the skipper. So release him from that and allow him to play freely,” Gavaskar said.
Tiwary echoed similar thoughts but was more direct, saying it would be “best” for LSG to remove him as captain.
“I feel that, under the pressure of captaincy, we are losing Pant the batter — someone who has performed in international cricket and the IPL previously. He is not getting those runs this season. So release him from the captaincy burden and let him play purely as a batter. That would be best for LSG,” he added.
Who should replace Pant?
LSG have South Africa T20I captain Aiden Markram in their ranks. He has been highly successful as a leader in the SA20, guiding Sunrisers Eastern Cape to back-to-back titles in the first two seasons (2023 and 2024), while also contributing as a top-order batter.
Jaffer had pitched a similar idea a week earlier.
“I think Aiden Markram is a better captain. He has led South Africa very successfully; he is mentally strong, very composed, and I think he can get the best out of the other players. But this doesn’t look like something that will actually happen. This is just my suggestion, but if I were there, that’s what I would do,” he had said.
