Lucknow. Rishabh Pant may be stripped of the captaincy of Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) due to his failure to live up to expectations in the last two seasons as its director of cricket Tom Moody has admitted that the wicketkeeper batsman has failed to handle the pressure. LSG finished seventh in 2025, while its performance this season was worse than last year. Under Pant’s captaincy, the franchise won only 10 out of 28 matches in two seasons.

“If we talk about captaincy, he has certainly found it challenging and the results reflect that,” Moody told reporters after Saturday’s seven-wicket loss to Punjab Kings. “We have to consider whether this pressure is affecting his performance in batting as well.” I know this session has been difficult for us, but we will think about it. We will look into every aspect.”

LSG had bought Pant for a record Rs 27 crore, so his performance was being monitored from the very beginning. Meanwhile, he kept struggling to score runs. Pant, considered one of India’s most explosive batsmen, performed brilliantly in IPL 2018. Then he scored 684 runs at a strike rate of 173.60. After this, in 2019 he scored 488 runs at a strike rate of 162.66.

However, for LSG, Pant scored 581 runs in two seasons and his strike rate was 135.74, which is lower than his career strike rate of 144.18. Recently, KL Rahul was appointed vice-captain of the Test team in place of Pant. He has also been dropped from the ODI team. After this, now this comment of Moody has come.

“We certainly haven’t lived up to our own expectations or standards,” he said. As far as the leadership of the franchise is concerned, it is certainly an issue that we will look at seriously in the future. “We look at the performance of each department each season and take some informed decisions, but it certainly feels like we need to look at starting from scratch,” Moody said.

He said that no single person can be held responsible for this disappointing performance. “We are all responsible for this disappointing season,” Moody said. I don’t think this is the time to point fingers at any particular person. We are all accountable and now is not the time to put blame on any particular department.

He said, “We all need time to think calmly about this, but there are some things that we need to pay attention to and will take care of them.” Meanwhile, Punjab Kings assistant coach Brad Haddin said, “Our team performed very well in this match. You want your best players to perform well in a match like this.

“These are the games you want to play, where everything is at stake,” he said. For the last few days, there was this sparkle in the eyes of the captain (Shreyas Iyer, who scored a century in this match). With his performance, he wants to make an important contribution in changing the course of the match and taking us to the final.