Rishabh Pant has faced 32 balls in IPL 2025, and he has been dismissed four times. Only one of his four innings has lasted beyond ten balls.
It's a sequence of low scores; a short sequence, as of now. It can happen to any batter, in any format, and of the three formats, it's likeliest to happen in T20. These sequences happen multiple times to batters if their careers last long enough, and several times they are pattern-free things that everyone forgets about as soon as they end.
Is there a pattern to this one? It would appear not. Pant has been out twice in 16 balls against pace, and twice in 16 balls against spin. One of his dismissals to pace was off a high full toss that took him by surprise and would likely have been no-balled in the days before ball-tracking technology began to mediate these decisions. One of his dismissals to spin was to a half-tracker down the leg side that he happened to hit straight to short fine-leg.
It feels wrong to even try and look for a pattern. We like to think we have all accepted that as batters take risks more frequently in T20 cricket, many of them will go through weeks of failing to get out of single digits and that this will often happen without anyone being able to say with any conviction that something about their technique seems off, or that teams have worked out a method to get them out or keep them quiet long enough to force a wicket-inducing error.
We like to think all this, but the moment a big-name player fails (we cringe at using that word but we'll use it anyway) three or four times in a row, we go back to a way of looking at the game that we like to think we've left behind us, a way that judges outcomes rather than processes. He's not scoring runs. Something must be wrong.
Pant is not scoring runs. Something could be wrong. But have we really seen enough to be able to tell?
He has faced 32 balls this season, across four innings. He has scored 19 runs. That sounds bad, and it sounds worse if you turn those numbers into an average (4.75) and a strike rate (59.37), but we're still in the territory of it's too early to tell.
Keep in mind that Pant is coming off a long break, having not played any international cricket since the New Year's Test in Sydney. His last competitive game before Lucknow Super Giants' (LSG) match against his old team Delhi Capitals (DC) on March 24 was a Ranji Trophy game that ended on January 24.
Rest can do players good - it seems to have helped Mohammed Siraj, certainly - but it can also leave them rusty. It can take batters a little longer than bowlers to get their muscle memory back to full sharpness because so much of their art is about reaction.
There's really only one wise way to look at Pant's season so far. It is to wait and watch. Yes, at INR 27 crore, he's the most expensive cricketer in IPL history. Yes, he's leading a new team. Yes, his scores have a bearing on his team's results. Yes, he's currently not in India's T20I team and is only their reserve wicketkeeper in ODIs. Yes, his scores could have a bearing on his selection in those two formats. But it really is too early to try and read patterns into his scores.
It isn't as if this is an extension of poor form from recent IPL seasons. He scored 340 runs at an average of 30.90 and a strike rate of 151.78 in IPL 2022. He missed IPL 2023 after suffering a car crash that left him needing reconstructive surgery on three key knee ligaments. He came back last season, and it was as if he had never gone away: 446 runs at 40.54, and 155.40.
Pant has played eight full IPL seasons. He has scored his runs at 150-plus strike rates in five of them, failing to do so only in 2016 - his debut season - and the Covid-19-ravaged seasons of 2020 and 2021. It's a terrific record, and he's a wicketkeeper on top of it. He has strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, but because he bats in a way that's almost unique to him, we tend to underestimate the robustness of his methods and pay inordinate attention to his flaws.
He has come back from a bit of a break, and he has started a new season with four low scores. It can happen to anyone, but Rishabh Pant isn't just anyone. It's his blessing and his curse.