Rishabh Pant had made his debut in 2015 for Delhi Daredevils under the captaincy of Zaheer Khan. The wicketkeeper-batter is intrinsically an aggressive middle-order player. He played many counter-attacking innings in a patience-testing tournament like Ranji Trophy. He didn’t get too many opportunities to showcase his talent before the whole cricketing world in his debut season. But in 2016 and 2017, the actual glow of Pant’s batting had come out through the counter-attacking knocks he played. From the terrific performance of IPL, Rishabh Pant got a first chance to represent Indian National Team on Feb 17 against England.
In 84 IPL matches, he has scored 2498 runs with an aggressive strike rate of 147. He played many mesmerising knocks in his 6-year long IPL career, where he made tangible progress, which ultimately helped him perform extravagantly in the international cricket sphere. He scored a lone century against Kane Williamson leading Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2018. Rishabh has been good till the time in all three formats and also in the IPL.
Here are the top 5 knocks from his archive of IPL performances:
#1 128*(63) – DC vs SRH in 2018
In a league match versus SRH, Rishabh Pant was the only striking batter standing through the game for Delhi Capitals. Rishabh scores 128* with a humongous strike rate of 210. He destroyed the whole bowling line-up of Sunrisers Hyderabad. Batting first, Delhi had put a mammoth score of 187 for SRH, while Shikhar Dhawan, along with Kane Williamson, joined the action party with Rishabh Pant while stepping in for a chase. However, the tough batting against a poor bowling line-up of Delhi had worked for Hyderabad, as they chased down the target at the end of the match.
#2 97(43) – DD vs GL in 2017
The skipper Suresh Raina had led the Gujarat Lions from the front; he had hit a brilliant fifty along with the wiki Dinesh Karthik they had posted a total of 208/6 wickets in total. But for Delhi, Sanju Samson stood firm in the beginning as he scored 61 runs in just 31 balls, but later as Pant joined him with 97(43), the target was looking so narrow before both the batters. In the end, Shreyas Iyer has finished the job for Delhi by taking them beyond the victory line.
#3 85(48) – DC vs RCB in 2018
The Virat Kohli leading RCB opted to ball first as DC put a target of 175 thanks to Rishabh Pant’s bolstering knock of 85(48) and a half-century by Shreyas Iyer. But RCB and especially Ab de Villiers had murderous intentions for the DC. As he finished the game two over before the allotted 20 overs of slot and 6 wickets remained in the hand of RCB. Rishabh had been again standing on a disappointing side as the DC bowlers could not capitalize the score set by their batters.
#4 78*(27) – DC vs MI in 2019
This time the blistering knock of Rishabh Pant had kept his team on a catbird seat till the last ball of the game. He smashed 7 fours and 7 sixes in his rocking knock of 78*(27) with a conquering strike rate of 290. While this time, MI batters had failed to get the team through the streak as Yuvraj Singh scored a gritty fifty against a quality bowling side of Delhi capitals. This is one of the most dismantling knocks of Rishabh Pant across all the formats which he played till the moment.
#5 79(45) – DC vs CSK in 2018
The MS Dhoni leading CSK had made a phonetic start to the season by winning an encounter against Delhi Capitals with brilliant fifties of MS Dhoni and Shane Watson. Both of them took CSK to the flyer of 211, which was almost impossible for DC to chase down against a gun bowling attack of CSK. But Rishabh had altered his mind as he took Delhi’s capitals very close to the target with his phenomenal knock of 79(45) by punching 7 fours and 4 sixes, and DC was just short by 13 runs to finish off the game with a victory.
