Pundits felt Rishabh Pant’s knock against Royal Challengers Bangalore at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium on Saturday was one of the best they had seen from the wicket-keeper batsman, but Delhi Daredevils once again ended on the losing side as AB de Villiers ensured that RCB romped home. And with the loss, DD are now sitting at the bottom of the points table with two points after 5 games with just one win.
And the main reason behind this is the lack of support for Pant from the other Daredevils batsmen. While the team started well with skipper Gautam Gambhir hitting 55 in the first game against Kings XI Punjab, there have been few noteworthy performances from the batters in the team. In fact, Shreyas Iyer’s score of 52 in the last game was also another one-off show as he has otherwise managed to score just 94 runs in all.
Pant is Delhi’s top run getter this season by a substantial margin. His aggregate of 223 runs in 5 innings is 32 runs more than the aggregate score of the next two leading run getters for DD. Jason Roy and Shreyas Iyer have aggregated 97 runs and 94 runs respectively. Pant has hit 37 boundaries, the most by any DD player this season, which is still 3 more than the cumulative boundaries of Roy, Iyer and Gambhir. He also has the best strike rate among DD batsmen. Pant has a strike rate of 176.98 which is marginally better than Maxwell’s strike rate of 176.08 and Morris’ (176.92).
In fact, after Pant’s 48-ball 85 against RCB, Mandeep Singh said he saw shadows of Yuvraj Singh in the batsman.
“Rishabh is amazing. When we were growing up, we used to talk about Yuvraj Singh. Yuvi paa used to hit those big sixes more than anyone else. I think, in this generation, Rishabh is one name, who can smack sixes like him (Yuvraj) at will. He has immense ability,” Mandeep said.
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