Sunil Gavaskar backs Rishabh Pant to become a successful captain

Sunil Gavaskar, the former Indian cricketer, reckons that Rishabh Pant has the potential to taste loads of success as a skipper. The veteran lauded the southpaw, saying that his temperament as a leader was on par with his exhilarating skills. Pant, recently, led the Delhi Capitals (DC) in the 2021 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) after Shreyas Iyer was ruled out due to a shoulder injury.

Despite not having their regular skipper, Pant did an excellent job. When the IPL was suspended for an indefinite time period, the Capitals were placed in the top half of the points table. Gavaskar feels that the left-handed Pant will learn from his mistakes going forward.

Gavaskar lauds Rishabh Pant

“The standout team Delhi Capitals under young Rishabh Pant. By the sixth game, one could see that he was getting tired of being asked about being captain. Every presenter at the post-game ceremony had the same question to him.

“What he showed was a spark that can become a roaring fire if allowed to burn naturally. Yes, he will make mistakes; which captain doesn’t?” Gavaskar wrote in his column for Sportstar.

Gavaskar, who played 125 Tests and 108 ODIs from 1971 to 1987, stated that Pant has been ‘street-smart’ and the approach has helped him take his team out of jail plenty of times.

“But like he showed in the few games in the IPL that he is clever enough to learn and his usual street-smart savvy meant he was on top of most situations and was finding his own method to get out of sticky ones.

“He is one for the future, no doubt about it. That’s because he has shown that talent can meet opportunity only when it walks hand in hand with temperament,” he added.

In the 2021 IPL, Pant had shown reasonable form with the bat in hand. In eight innings, he managed 213 runs at an average and strike rate of 35.50 and 131.48 respectively.

At the international level, Pant has grown leaps and bounds. From the 2020-21 tour of Australia, Rishabh has shown a lot of fearlessness and has scored a lot of runs in heaps.