Rishabh Pant steps down as LSG captain after IPL 2026 wooden-spoon finish
Rishabh Pant has stepped down as captain of Lucknow Super Giants, closing a two-year spell that never delivered the lift either side wanted. The franchise confirmed the decision on Friday, and it was Pant himself who went to the management and asked to be relieved of the job, rather than the other way round.
A campaign that ended at the bottom
The timing tells you most of what you need to know. LSG finished dead last in IPL 2026, winning just four of their 14 league games and collecting the wooden spoon a year on from a seventh-place finish in 2025. This was a squad rebuilt around Pant at the 2025 mega auction, where he went for a record ₹27 crore and became the most expensive buy in the tournament's history. Two seasons later, the team has nothing in the way of playoff cricket to show for it.
Add the numbers up and the picture sharpens. Pant led Lucknow in 28 matches across the two years for 10 wins and 18 defeats, missing the playoffs both times. A captaincy that arrived with a price tag and a mandate to challenge for the title instead spent most of its life in the bottom half of the table.
His own form added to the weight
Part of the strain was Pant's batting. In 2025 he scraped together 269 runs at an average of 24.45 and a strike rate of 133.16, the season lit up by a lone century. He nudged things forward this year with 312 runs at 138.05, but the two-season return of 581 runs at 135.74 sits well below his career strike rate of 146.80. For a player whose value has always been the speed at which he scores, that is the kind of dip that follows you into team meetings.
Tom Moody, Lucknow's director of cricket, framed the exit as a mutual call made with the bigger picture in mind. "Rishabh approached the franchise with his request and we have respectfully accepted it," he said. "These decisions are never easy. We are grateful for everything Rishabh has brought to this dressing room as captain. Our focus now is on the collective, on rebuilding." The message from inside the camp is that the load of leading while out of touch had simply become too much, and that Pant wanted to put his energy back into batting.
Where Lucknow turn next
Pant stays at the franchise as a player, which keeps his wicketkeeping and his middle-order hitting in the side without the captaincy hanging off them. The harder question is who takes the armband into IPL 2027. Former India opener Wasim Jaffer has already floated Mitchell Marsh and Aiden Markram as candidates, with Nicholas Pooran, the man who has carried much of LSG's batting, an interesting omission from that shortlist.
For Pant himself, the reset comes at a useful moment. With a busy India schedule ahead and his place in the national setup under more scrutiny than it has been in a while, shedding the franchise captaincy lets him do the thing he does best without the noise around it. Lucknow, meanwhile, head into another auction cycle needing more than a marquee name to fix what two seasons have exposed.
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