The owner of Lucknow Super Giants, Sanjiv Goenka, on Monday announced that Rishabh Pant will lead the team in the coming season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2025.
To everyone’s surprise, during the IPL mega auction in Jeddah last year, Pant was bought by LSG for an unbelievable Rs 27 crore and emerged the costliest player.
He would be the fourth captain of LSG after Krunal Pandya, Nicholas Pooran, and KL Rahul.
LSG has qualified for both the playoffs in the Indian Premier Leagues for the years 2022 and 2023. So, they concluded their very first two seasons with a lot of positivity.
They had a disastrous time in the 2024 season and could not even make it to the post-season after securing the seventh position in the points table with an abysmal net run rate.
Apart from the 2023 season, which he had to miss since he suffered injuries in a vehicle accident in December 2022, Pant has been the captain of Delhi Capitals (DC) since 2021-2024. This would be his second experience as an IPL captain.
Pant’s nine-year association with DC ended on 31 October just ahead of the deadline for retaining players for IPL 2025. His going away from the team was much due to his holding a leadership role.
Pant will be mentored by team mentor Zaheer Khan and head coach Justin Langer at LSG whom he met during Border-Gavaskar Trophy series in Australia.
The batting for him will come from Nicholas Pooran, David Miller, Mitchell Marsh, Aiden Markram, Ayush Badoni, Aryan Juyal, Abdul Samad, and Himmat Singh. Among the retained players, he will have Ravi Bishnoi, Mayank Yadav, and Mohsin Khan, and Indian seamers in the ranks of Akash Deep and Avesh Khan as his bowling staff.
