₹27 Crore, a Side Strain, Four Days With Yuvraj and One 118 Not Out: Why Justin Langer Is Right to Back Rishabh Pant for a Big IPL 2026

Justin Langer has seen enough champions up close — Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting — to know what the recovery arc looks like. The LSG head coach was characteristically direct when asked about Rishabh Pant this week. “With all champions, they don’t stay down for long. His last game last year in the IPL, we saw how brilliant he can be, so that’s our expectation for him this year,” Langer told ESPNcricinfo.

The last game Langer is referring to was a 118 not out off 54 balls against RCB in a dead-rubber league match — the kind of innings that reminded every cricket follower what this particular player looks like when the switch is thrown. It is that version of Pant that Lucknow Super Giants paid ₹27 crore for. It is that version LSG need to win matches.

Whether he is fully available and fully himself from match one of IPL 2026 is the question that matters most for the Lucknow franchise this season.

The Injury That Nearly Derailed the Season Before It Started

On January 10, 2026, Pant was at the BCA Stadium in Vadodara for an optional practice session ahead of India’s ODI series against New Zealand. A throwdown delivery from a specialist hit him just above the waist on the right side. He went down immediately. The team physio, doctor and head coach Gautam Gambhir rushed to assist. MRI scans confirmed the diagnosis: a right-sided internal oblique muscle tear — the technical name for what is commonly called a side strain.

The BCCI ruled him out of the New Zealand ODI series immediately. Dhruv Jurel was named as backup wicketkeeper in his place.

The oblique muscle is the lateral abdominal wall that rotates and bends the torso — and for a batter, it is the engine of the pull shot, the cut and the sweep. An internal oblique tear is not a trivial injury; it requires complete rest in the acute phase, followed by a graduated rehabilitation programme before batting — specifically, the twisting and torquing forces involved in hitting — can resume safely.

Pant, characteristically, remained publicly upbeat through the weeks that followed. “Every comeback has taught me something about life,” he told the Indian Express in early February. “I’m recovering well and will be back on the field soon.”

By February 9, the BCCI confirmed he had resumed batting in the nets at the Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. By February 17, journalist Abhishek Tripathi reported that Pant had fully recovered and was fit in all formats.

Four Days With Yuvraj at Brabourne: More Than Just Batting Practice

The preparation story that tells you most about Pant’s mindset going into IPL 2026 is not the injury or the recovery. It is what he chose to do once he was fit.

Rather than go directly to the LSG pre-season camp, Pant spent four days at Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium in a private training block with Yuvraj Singh — day and night sessions, focused specifically on his white-ball game. Yuvraj, who has been steadily building a reputation as a mentor after working with Abhishek Sharma, Shubman Gill and Prabhsimran Singh, structured the sessions around new shot options, tactical flexibility and what CNBCTV18 described as a mental “reset” for Pant’s limited-overs career.

The parallel between the two men is not incidental. Yuvraj Singh is, among Indian cricketers, the person who has made more comebacks from more categories of adversity than almost any other — groin injuries, hamstring issues, cancer treatment and chemotherapy between 2011 and 2012, multiple franchise trades, form troughs and career doubts that followed each of them. If anyone understands what it feels like to return with something to prove and a reduced window in which to prove it, it is Yuvraj.

Pant, though 28 years old with a career that has already included a catastrophic car accident in December 2022, ten months of rehabilitation, a Test comeback that produced a Dharamshala century and then three years of international cricket — is arguably already in the same psychological territory. He does not just train to be fit. He trains to be ready for moments.

After the Brabourne sessions, Pant joined LSG’s pre-season camp in Chennai, currently running at the Coaching Beyond Ground facility under bowling coach Bharat Arun and batting coach Lance Klusener.

In a team meeting, Pant addressed the squad — heavy with new recruits following LSG’s rebuild after their seventh-place finish in IPL 2025 — and delivered a message that CNBCTV18 summarised as a call to “build relationships.” Pant’s framing was specific: the current phase was not just physical training but “emotional and professional integration.”

The IPL 2025 Numbers — and Why the Context Matters

Pant’s IPL 2025 season return — 269 runs in 14 matches at a strike rate of 133.16 — is widely described as his worst in the competition since debut. That is technically accurate. It is also, in important ways, a misleading summary.

LSG finished seventh in IPL 2025, meaning Pant was batting in a team environment where lower-order pressure, absence of reliable finishers and unpredictable bowling selections frequently left him in difficult match situations — chasing impossible targets or trying to accelerate from the wrong positions. A wicketkeeper-batter batting at number three or four in a team that has lost early wickets and has no dependable finisher from six to eight is not playing in conditions that produce top aggregate returns.

The counterargument to the 269-run average is the innings that concluded LSG’s league campaign: 118 not out off 54 balls against RCB at the Ekana Stadium, in a dead match, with nothing at stake. Pant made it relevant by batting as though his IPL career depended on every delivery. He hit 9 fours and 8 sixes, swept Yuzuvendra Chahal from outside off stump, pulled Lockie Ferguson from the length ball, and finished the innings in the 19th over by sweeping the last ball for six. It was the knock of a man who uses dead-rubber matches not to preserve himself but to find form through challenge.

The IPL 2026 squad LSG have assembled is considerably stronger than their 2025 unit.

The addition of Mohammad Shami — returning to IPL cricket after nearly three injury-disrupted years — and Nicholas Pooran as a genuine death-hitting specialist addresses the two most specific weaknesses of last year’s LSG squad: bowling penetration in the power play and finishing ability below the top five.

LSG open their 2026 campaign against Delhi Capitals at the Ekana Stadium in Lucknow on April 1 — two days after IPL 2026 launches on March 28.

“Champions Don’t Stay Down For Long”: The Evidence Supports Langer

The line Langer used — “champions don’t stay down for long” — has a specific relevance to Pant that goes beyond motivational slogan territory.

Pant has been down before, in ways that make a two-month side strain look relatively straightforward. On December 30, 2022, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the Delhi-Dehradun highway, crossed the divider, hit a guardrail and was pulled from the wreck with a gashed forehead, ligament damage, cartilage tears and a fractured kneecap. The BCCI’s initial assessment suggested a return to international cricket was at least twelve months away. He was back in eleven months, scoring 89 not out at Rajkot in his Test comeback. He played 41 internationals in the following two years.

A right-sided oblique muscle tear sustained by a throwdown delivery at nets is a genuine injury that required proper management. It is also, on Pant’s personal scale of things he has overcome, not the defining test. The form dip in IPL 2025 — manageable within the context of a struggling team — and the injury that followed it are the “down” phase. Justin Langer’s prediction of what comes next is backed by everything the batter has done every previous time he has been here.

The IPL begins in thirteen days. LSG’s most important player has been hitting at Brabourne with Yuvraj Singh at night, learning new shots and resetting his game. He is ready.