The 27-crore captain has run out of credit: how LSG's IPL 2026 unraveled
The 27-crore captain has run out of credit. Lucknow Super Giants' first-round exit from IPL 2026 was sealed at Chepauk on Sunday, and the post-mortem starts in the same place every conversation about this season has started: with Rishabh Pant. Three wins from eleven, the second-worst net run rate in the league, six points, and an auction headline that has aged into a millstone.
Pant himself has been the cleanest measure of the problem. His 204 runs in nine innings before the Chennai loss came at a strike rate just above 128 with one fifty to his name, and the fifty was an unbeaten knock against Sunrisers Hyderabad that looked nothing like the player LSG paid 27 crore for. Bharat Arun, the bowling coach, has been left fielding questions about his captain's batting and saying out loud that nobody at the club is thinking about the price tag. They might be the only ones.
A captaincy that never settled
The strangest part of the run is how often the line-up looked unfamiliar. Pant has shuffled the order match to match, with multiple opening combinations and no clear plan for who anchors the chase or who finishes it. Mitchell Marsh has been the only batter LSG could trust at the top, and his strike rate just above 150 has been carrying a unit whose collective strike rate sits at the bottom of the league. None of his teammates are inside the top twenty run-scorers in the tournament. That is what an unsettled order produces.
Death overs that wouldn't hold
The bowling has been the second story, and on most nights the louder one. Avesh Khan and Mohammed Shami have done their share, Digvesh Rathi has flashed value, and at Chepauk on Sunday Shahbaz Ahmed and Rathi gave the side a half-chance with two wickets each. But the death has been honest about its struggles all season. LSG have failed to defend totals over 220, and on Sunday they put up 203 with Josh Inglis hitting a 17-ball fifty and Shahbaz finishing 43 not out, only for Urvil Patel's 13-ball fifty to make the chase routine.
The shape of the squad
The auction picture looks different from this side of May. Spending 27 crore on a wicketkeeper-batter who finishes the season averaging in the mid-twenties is the kind of call that gets defended with phrases like "form is temporary" until it doesn't. The supporting cast around Pant was supposed to absorb a slow start. Instead, everyone has been slow at once: Nicholas Pooran has had one telling knock in nine, Marsh has been the only top-order constant, and the middle order has neither a stabiliser nor a finisher who can be relied on across phases. Justin Langer keeps backing his captain, and the practice-game 95 he points to is real, but match performances are what the table reads from.
What's left of the season
Three games to go and nothing to play for in the table, which makes the next ten days a reckoning rather than a campaign. The honest version of the review is that LSG built a side around a captain who hasn't captained the way the auction implied he would, paid for a season-defining batter who has not defined the season, and then lost the bowling arms race in a year where 200-plus targets were the median ask. Whether Pant stays in the role for 2027 is the first question. Whether the wider rebuild stops at the captain or runs through the squad is the bigger one.
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