Baby-faced, bats left-handed and feasts on fours and sixes. Vaibhav Suryavanshi? Yes. But he’s not the OG in that category. That would be Rishabh Pant.

While Suryavanshi seems to have shone brighter than the sun, the incandescence of his incredible innings on Monday blinding fans and pundits alike, Pant has been a curious case this season. Usually a swashbuckling batter, the variety and audacity of whose shots make the onlooker sit upright whenever he is at the crease, Pant in IPL 2025 has been as clueless as a lost puppy.

In the last seven days, we have seen Pant, also the Lucknow Super Giants skipper, bat twice. First, against the Delhi Capitals, and then on Sunday, against Mumbai Indians. Both times, the 27-year-old left us bewildered, though for different reasons.

Against Delhi, Pant came out to bat as low as No. 7 for practically no rhyme or reason. Lucknow were batting first, their openers had put on an almost 90-run stand and when the second wicket fell, in the 12th over, the stage was perfectly set for Pant to come in at his usual No. 4 position. But he didn’t, as Abdul Samad, David Miller and Ayush Badoni walked ahead of him. When Pant finally came in at the fall of the fifth wicket, only two balls were left to be played in the innings. Pant could not score off the first delivery he faced, and off the second, he tried a reverse lap shot against Mukesh Kumar only to drag the ball onto the stumps.

Against Mumbai, better sense prevailed as Pant walked in at No. 4 when his team was 60/2 in the chase of a 216-run target. But all good senses deserted him when he went for a reverse sweep off the very second ball he faced, that too after hitting the
first for a boundary. It was a premeditated attempt and Pant was caught at
short third man. The choice of the shot and its timing looked absolutely ugly in a cricketing sense.

The reverse sweep had also brought about his downfall against Rajasthan Royals, the game that preceded these two matches. He was on 3 after facing eight balls when he tried reverse sweeping Wanindu Hasaranga. So thrice in a row Pant has been dismissed while going after the reverse shot.

Why is he doing that? Is he being stubborn in his head, trying to prove to himself that he knows how to play that shot? But who does that when you are fishing for runs in a treacherous ocean of off-form? It’s a team game, he is the captain and he is his team’s best bet in the middle order. Logically, someone in the Lucknow set-up should go up to him and tell him that ‘Rishabh Pant can play a hell lot of shots and so this infatuation with reverse sweep is plain and simple foolish’. But chances are nobody will do that and, instead, will come up with the cliched logic — ‘...but it’s his natural game’.

A look at Pant’s sequence of scores this season will show that it’s far from natural... 0, 15, 2, 2, 21, 63, 3, 0, 4. Rather, it’s spooky to believe that it’s the same Pant who scored 446 runs at an average of 40.55 and a strike rate of 155.40 in the last IPL.

It’s not that he has suddenly become a bad batter, his finesse must have got foggy somehow. Why? That only he knows and for that he must question himself. But wait, he’s reluctant to do that too. “See (I am) keeping it very simple... In a season like this, where things are not going your way, you’re going to start questioning yourself as a player and that is something you don’t want to do. When the team isn’t doing well, you’ve got to think about that because eventually it’s a team game. Yes, one player definitely makes a difference, but every time if you take out the individual, it’s not the right thing to do, I guess,” he said after the Mumbai match.

But is it so simple? Isn’t his form, as an individual, hurting his team? Will he not question himself why he is so adamant about playing the reverse sweep so early in the innings? What good is it doing to him or his team?

One reason for Pant’s struggles this season could be his uncharacteristically shabby handling of the spinners. He has scored only 36 runs against the spinners at a horrendous strike rate of 76.59. Versus pacers, his strike rate goes up to 113.84.

This is Pant’s ninth IPL, would have been 10th if he had not missed the 2023 edition with an accident. He has invested enough years in it and now is the best time to withdraw wisdom from it. He needs to reverse his poor run, but for that he does not necessarily need the reverse sweep.