Aakash Chopra left flummoxed by Rishabh Pant’s captaincy in IPL 2022

 

Former Indian cricketer Aakash Chopra admits that he was left surprised by several decisions that Delhi Capitals’ young captain Rishabh Pant took during the course of IPL 2022. He believes that the maverick batsman made plenty of mistakes while captaining his side during the tournament.

Rishabh Pant, who was appointed as the captain of Delhi Capitals last season in order to fill in for the injured Shreyas Iyer. However, even with Iyer returning for the second half of IPL 2021 in UAE, the DC management decided to persist with Pant as captain and even retained him over Iyer who is now the leader of Kolkata Knight Riders.

However, Pant has attracted plenty of criticism for the way he has led DC in IPL 2022. Chopra mentioned an example where he pointed out that in a league match against KKR, Kuldeep Yadav picked up four wickets from his first three overs. However, Pant didn’t bring him back for his fourth over.

Aakash Chopra also added that such calculation errors happened repeatedly with Pant and his bowling changes have been extremely underwhelming. On many different occasions, a frontline bowler wasn’t given his full quota of four overs.

“Rishabh Pant as a player is one of my favourites and I really like him as we also come from the same club. But his captaincy wasn’t that great. There were several occasions where I was left scratching my head.

There was a match in which Kuldeep Yadav took four wickets in his three overs but wasn’t given his fourth over. This didn’t just happen once and in many instances DC’s main bowlers didn’t bowl their four overs,” Chopra said on his YouTube channel.

Besides Pant’s bowling changes, his DRS calls as well as antics on the field have also not been seen in a good light by most cricket fans and experts. In a league match against Rajasthan Royals, DC were on the receiving end of a harsh umpire’s call and Rishabh Pant decided to hold up play and send a representative inside the field to have a chat with the officials. Even in the last league match against Mumbai Indians, Pant decided not to review Tim David nicking the ball even though quite a few players suggested him to take the DRS.

Pant also had a quiet year with the bat which didn’t help his side as they suffered from lapses in the middle overs. He amassed 340 runs at an average of 30.91 from his 14 appearances.