Former India player Pragyan Ojha has said that the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) should continue to support Manish Pandey, despite his recent outings. He believes that the franchise must back him as they do not have any other contenders for the No. 3 spot now.

While speaking on Cricbuzz, he shared that LSG’s experiment of promoting Krishnappa Gowtham to No. 3 didn’t work during their match against the Rajasthan Royals (RR) on April 10. He also feels that there are no other players available who’d be comfortable playing in that position apart from Manish Pandey.

He explained: “If you have picked Manish Pandey, then you must show faith in him. They can afford to be patient with him. Otherwise, you will give Manan Vohra a role that he may not be comfortable in. We saw how Krishnappa Gowtham also wasn’t comfortable batting at that position.”

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Meanwhile, former India opener Virender Sehwag has also echoed Ojha’s words. He added that even if Pandey continues to fail in a few more matches, he has the ability to score big when the team needs him the most. However, Manish Pandey has come under the scanner for his lean patch in this year’s league. He has managed just 66 runs from six games so far and has a batting average of 14.67 as well. On the other hand, LSG pacer Avesh Khan has missed the team’s previous game due to a niggle. Sehwag also opined that the fast bowler must take time to recover from his injury as well.

Sehwag said: “LSG do not have anybody who can come in place of Manish Pandey at No. 3. Evin Lewis is a foreign player and Manan Vohra is an opener. I don’t believe Vohra is a better option than Pandey. Now that they don’t have options, they should let Pandey play more games. It doesn’t matter if he flops in 2-3 games, but maybe he can come up with a match-winning performance during a crucial match.”

He added: “Avesh Khan should only come back into the side once he is completely fit. LSG have played just 8 matches and have a lot of matches to play. It won’t make much of a difference if Avesh Khan doesn’t play 1-2 games. But it would be a problem for them if he plays in the next fixture and gets injured during the game.”

While talking about Kolkata Knight Riders’ (KKR) defeat, he stated that they missed a trick by playing just four frontline bowlers in their match against Delhi Capitals (DC) on Thursday. He also thinks that Shreyas Iyer led team had a better chance of winning the game if they had an extra bowler in their playing XI.

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He said, “KKR were a bowler short. If they had another frontline bowler in their lineup, then Iyer would not have had to try these many bowling options. Things could have been different if they had an extra bowler.”

While speaking in the video, Virender Sehwag said that Umesh Yadav was the only positive for the Knight Riders in the game. He said, “Umesh Yadav knows how to swing the ball. When the ball moves at that pace, it starts troubling the best of the batters. He hits the corridor of uncertainty with the new ball. While he did a fine job in this game, he didn’t get enough support from the rest of the KKR bowlers. The KKR batters aren’t scoring enough runs. Even while chasing, they haven’t been able to do well. The batting unit will have to score over 160-170 runs consistently. Once that happens, then they can focus on what’s going wrong with their bowling.”