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Sanjiv Goenka opens up on being a ‘misunderstood’ owner heading into IPL 2025
By SMCS - Jan 24, 2025 12:30 pm
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Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) owner Sanjiv Goenka has said that he and the franchise’s new captain Rishabh Pant are ‘misunderstood’ people now. However, the RPSG group chairman also added that he wasn’t bothered by all these comments about him on social media. However, Pant (₹27 crore) was LSG’s most expensive buy at the IPL 2025 auction, becoming the highest-paid player in the history of IPL as well.

rishabh pant
Rishabh Pant

In a video shared on his YouTube channel ‘Aakash Chopra,’ he said, “He (Pant) is a misunderstood cricketer and I am a misunderstood owner. You have to face it. There are situations when you counter it, and there are situations when you say you don’t want to counter it at all. Time will automatically prove what is right and what is wrong. A narrative is built, someone has a PR, so let it get built. It doesn’t matter. I suppose it does matter, but it doesn’t really matter in the long run. So, don’t let it impact you.”

However, Aakash Chopra also asked Sanjiv Goenka when and why he decided to appoint Rishabh Pant as the LSG captain.

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“Quite honestly, this decision was taken as soon as we succeeded in the auction, and why? It’s a very simple answer. Very few players have as much passion and desire to win as I have seen in Rishabh. I didn’t know Rishabh that well before. When I was seeing him play, there were little nuances about his game and body language that impressed me. He always puts the team ahead of self. That again is something that I felt is a great quality to have. The fact he had a near-fatal accident, and he had the willpower, determination, and discipline to overcome that and come back to his current form. That is again a sign of a winner,” he added.

Sanjiv Goenka has also shared that Rishabh Pant was the focus to all their plans heading into the IPL 2025 auction as well. He also stated that the franchise wanted Jos Buttler and then Yuzvendra Chahal as their second options, but couldn’t buy either as well.

Jos Buttler
Jos Buttler took a bizarre DRS call

“You have a plan A, you have a plan B, and you have a plan C. Rishabh was fixed in all our plans – A, B and C. The first plan was to go with Rishabh and Jos. So these were the two key players. We didn’t succeed in getting Jos. The second was Rishabh, then Yuzi. We didn’t succeed. The third thing was that we will go with an all-Indian pace attack and a solid middle order. So we had to fall back on our third plan. We are happy with the outcome and the result, of course, but you have to think on your feet and it helps that you have people like Zak (Zaheer Khan) with you at that moment, and that experience and wisdom become very useful,” Goenka added.

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In the same video, Aakash Chopra also asked Sanjiv Goenka whether he took inputs from Rishabh Pant about the players he wants to buy during the auction as well.

“There was a dialogue for sure. Eventually, our job is to create a team. After that, it’s over to the coach, the mentor, and the captain. We as owners do recognize that there are 14 games, you aren’t going to win all of them, and cannot win as well. You are going to win some, you are going to lose some, as long as you win enough to qualify to begin with, and then it’s anybody’s game once you have qualified. So our attempt is to leave players and let them play their natural game, and if you lose, you lose fighting, you don’t lose surrendering,” Sanjiv Goenka concluded.