New Delhi: Lucknow Super Giants owner Sanjiv Goenka drew from his past experiences with Rising Pune Supergiant, MS Dhoni and Steve Smith to indirectly blame captain KL Rahul and management for making too many poor decisions in IPL 2024. In their third season, after two playoff appearances, LSG slumped to seventh position, triggering speculations that Rahul could be released by the franchise. Despite repeated discussions between Goenka and Rahul, an agreement has not been reached.
Goenka felt the LSG missed having an incisive Indian mind, a Gautam Gambhir-type, to help make critical decisions at crucial moments during the last season. Inability to do so, he intimated, contributed to the team’s stumbles and inability to perform under pressure.
“Last year, I felt that an Indian mind, you can call him a mentor or anything, who has that fierce desire to win, was lacking a bit. Zaheer, even when he was a player, he was very determined to win. That was his only aim. I want that,” he told Sports Tak.
A video of Goenka in an animated discussion with skipper KL Rahul following LSG’s defeat to SRH this year went viral in no time. Though Goenka didn’t take Rahul’s or the leadership group’s name directly, he gave enough hints that he was not quite happy with the explanations coming from the management over the team’s underwhelming performance in the 17th edition of the IPL.
“I am not satisfied if someone comes and tells me we played badly today. Then, repeats the same thing the next two days. So I will ask him, ‘why?’ One player can be off-form, but XI players cannot be off-form every day. The decision-making role that Zaheer can play. The role that Gautam played was lacking last season. So my expectation from Zaheer is to work on that decision-making,” he said.
This is also the second time Sanjiv Goenka has owned an IPL franchise. His RPSG group earlier owned the Rising Pune Supergiant in IPL 2016 and 2017 when the BCCI had temporarily replaced Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings. In the first season, MS Dhoni was leading the side, but ahead of the IPL 2017, Dhoni was replaced by Steve Smith as captain. Under Smith’s captaincy, RPS reached the final of the 2017 edition of IPL but failed in chasing a modest 130 against Mumbai Indians after being on course till the halfway mark.
Goenka attributed the 2017 IPL final loss to the team’s inexperience. “The Super Giants family has been in the IPL for five years. Two of those were with Pune, and three were with Lucknow. When we reached the finals with Pune, it was a new and inexperienced team. You leave out Steve Smith and MS Dhoni, we didn’t have much experience in the team,” he said.
“We were about to win the final, but due to our lack of experience, we lost. So making the right calls in those crunch moments is key.”
Goenka’s claim that the team lacked experience, aside from Dhoni and Smith, is not entirely accurate. In the 2017 IPL final, Rising Pune Supergiant also had experienced players like Ajinkya Rahane, Manoj Tiwary, Dan Christian, and Jaydev Unadkat, who were part of the squad.
“Mumbai have a habit of winning. Everyone should emulate their never-say-die attitude. It was Pune’s match to win but they lost it by themselves because of the pressure applied by Mumbai. This attitude needs to be there in Lucknow. Otherwise, we would never win. We have to be confident in ourselves,” he said.
