Lot of gaps in our team because of injuries, says Pant

The way we planned the auction, if we had the same bowling attack, the story would be different, the Lucknow captain said.

HYDERABAD: Lucknow Super Giants captain Rishabh Pant, who is having a forgetful IPL so far, said that his team fell short by at least 10 runs short after his team lost to Sunrisers Hyderabad at home to be knocked out of the championship on Monday night.

“It couldn’t be the best season for us,” Pant said. “Getting into the tournament we knew a lot of gaps were there because of injuries. We decided we won’t talk about that, but it became difficult to close out those gaps,” Pant said in the post-match briefing.

Pant was seemingly referring to the prolonged absence of several core players. “The way we planned the auction, if we had the same bowling [attack], the story would be different,” the Lucknow captain said.

“At the same time, this is cricket, things can happen. Sometimes they go your way, sometimes they don’t. Need to take pride in the way we’re playing. Need to look at the positives other than discussing more on the negative side,” he said.

“There’s enough firepower in the batting,” Pant said. “That’s the biggest positive. Even the bowlers, they were bowling in good areas but they were patchy, a little bit. We were trying to make the best of it,” he said.

“We’ve been playing well in patches. In the first half of the season, the players did well, we tried to cover up all problems, but in the second half it became tougher and tougher to catch up against the teams doing well,” Pant said.

“Definitely the bowler Rathi (Digvesh) has come up nicely for us this season,” the losing captain said.

“The way he bowled was really good to see. Rathi is one of the positives. There are many areas as a team we need to keep improving on to find ourselves getting better and better,” he said.