Kevin Pietersen gutted by Rishabh Pant’s erratic stroke-play against New Zealand

Rishabh Pant is the kind of player, who doesn’t prefer to get bogged down for long. He doesn’t like playing dot balls and plays his strokes freely irrespective of the situation. The southpaw didn’t get picked in the initial 15-man squad for the ongoing World Cup. However, he came in as a replacement of Shikhar Dhawan, who was ruled out after developing a thumb injury in the game against Australia at the Kennington Oval in London.

Pant didn’t play the first few games and after Vijay Shankar injured his toe, he got into the eleven against England. After a couple of decent knocks, he found a place in the lineup for the semi-final match against New Zealand at the Old Trafford in Manchester. The Black Caps put on 239 on the board after which the likes of Trent Boult and Matt Henry reduced India to 5/3 in the fourth over.

Rishabh Pant throws away a start

A lot depended on Pant as he was looking good. The left-hander scored 32 runs off 56 balls with the help of four boundaries. However, he couldn’t quite hold his nerves and threw his wicket away to left-arm spinner Mitchell Santner. In the 23rd over, the tweaker bowled four dot balls in a row. The pressure built on Pant and he tried to clear the long boundary at the deep mid-wicket region.

Pant got on his knees, but couldn’t time the ball. The shot had elevation, but not the distance. Colin de Grandhomme took a good running catch to cut short Pant’s knock. Skipper Virat Kohli from the dressing room didn’t look pleased by any stretch of the imagination. In the meantime, former England batsman Kevin Pietersen is highly disappointed with the 21-year-old youngster.

He is gutted by the fact that Pant is not learning from his mistakes and is throwing wickets away in crunch situations of a match. India had already lost the likes of Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul, Dinesh Karthik and Virat Kohli, and Pant was needed to covert his start, but he couldn’t.

A dejected Pietersen took to Twitter and wrote, “How many times have we seen @RishabPant777 do that?????!!!!! The very reason he wasn’t picked initially! Pathetic!,”

Here is Pietersen’s tweet

How many times have we seen @RishabPant777 do that?????!!!!!

The very reason he wasn’t picked initially!

Pathetic!

— Kevin Pietersen🦏 (@KP24) July 10, 2019