Lucknow Super Giants captain Rishabh Pant endured yet another failure with the bat as the team was set a target of 216 runs by the Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede Stadium in an Indian Premier League game. Pant hit a boundary on the first ball of his innings against Mumbai and then perished the next ball itself. In IPL 2025, Pant has managed to score 106 runs off eight innings at an average of 13.25 and a strike rate of 96.36. LSG had bet big on Pant in the IPL mega auction, forking out a record amount of Rs 27 crore.
When asked by Raj Shamani on his Figuring Out podcast what the logic was for buying Rishabh Pant for Rs 27 crore, LSG owner Sanjiv Goenka said: “If we wanted an Indian match-winner, there were four options available in the auction that were of that level. Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul and Yuzvendra Chahal. When you go into a mega-auction, you’re looking for the long-term. Maybe 10 years. You’re looking for a younger player, relatively speaking! You’re looking for someone who has an X-factor. Rishabh has both.”
Sanjiv Goenka, owner of Lucknow Super Giants, chats with LSG captain Rishabh Pant during an IPL 2025 game. (PHOTO: Sportzpics for IPL)Goenka had also spoken about the think tank’s thought process on another podcast with Ranveer Allahbadia.
Goenka said that he was warned by a couple of “cricket experts” on the day of the IPL auction that the wicketkeeper-batter was destined to end up at a different team.
“Someone said that you must go for Chahal. Someone else said go for Jos Buttler. No one said you should go for Rishabh. They said it’s decided that Pant will end up at a certain team. Then I casually asked them what price tag would he fetch: someone said Rs 20 crore, someone else said Rs 25 crore. Mentally, I was confident that no one would splurge Rs 27 crore for him,” Goenka told Ranveer Allahbadia in a podcast episode earlier this year.
“There was science behind going at Rs 27 crore for Rishabh Pant. Delhi went till Rs 26.5 crore for Shreyas Iyer (before letting him go to Punjab Kings). So, then my feeling was, ‘Parth Jindal is so crazy for Rishabh Pant, he would go one up at the IPL Auction.’ So, the idea was to go two bids up from Parth, or even three bids up, and that is where he would stop. For Rishabh, we had calculated three scenarios, and in all of them, he was very important to us.”
Goenka said they knew they would get Pant and they had rationed Rs 25 to Rs 27 crore for him in all their plans.
