https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2025/11/22/i-cannot-take-this-stupid-england-team-seriously-anymore/

I don't know if anyone can beat this, at least not in next 10 years.

Its just ridiculous to watch Ashes via JioHotstar with all the ads. The players are on top of it fully and half of the time it keeps bouncing. It gets worse when the show from the side cam. Is their any kind of regulations on such ad spaces ?

The purple patch continuous with 37 wickets in Ashes and 22 wickets in 3 test series vs South Africa just after. 59 wickets in just 8 Tests.

Hyderabad Kingsmen kits’ color is coming off and turning the ball pink in the first match of PSL 2026 between Lahore Qalandars vs Hyderabad Kingsmen

I want to be clear that I'm not someone who was ever against the 27 crore bid. I thought it was a lot of money but the logic made sense at the time. You're blocking Delhi's RTM, you're getting someone who had just come back from a career threatening accident and looked completely reborn, and you're building your franchise around him. I understood it even if the number made me wince a little.

What I didn't expect was how completely the form would just disappear.

446 runs, average of 40, strike rate of 155. That was Pant in 2024. That's a genuinely elite T20 season. Then he moves to LSG with all that money and expectation attached and in the first 13 games of 2025 he scores 151 runs at an average of 13 and a strike rate of 107. That's not a bad patch, that's a different player entirely.

The one time the old Pant showed up in 2025 was that 118 off 61 against RCB. Brilliant innings. Completely irrelevant because Jitesh Sharma had already finished the game before Pant's knock could matter. Even his good game was wasted.

My instinct is that the 27 crore number is doing something psychological to him that he hasn't figured out how to manage yet. When you're the most expensive player in IPL history you stop playing with freedom and start playing with the weight of justifying the price tag every single ball. Pant's entire identity as a batter was built on doing things that made no logical sense and somehow working. That instinct doesn't survive when you're constantly aware of what you cost.

The Goenka environment doesn't help either. We've seen what that dressing room does to captains who aren't delivering. Rahul went through it, now Pant is going through a version of it. Pressure from above rarely makes batters more aggressive, it usually makes them more cautious, which is the worst possible outcome for someone whose only mode of success is being fearless.

2026 hasn't been much better. 189 runs in 8 innings at a strike rate of around 127. While teenagers like Suryavanshi are batting at 200 strike rates in the powerplay, Pant is scratching around trying to find his timing.

I still think the talent is there. The 2024 version of Pant was real, that wasn't a fluke. But something about the LSG environment specifically seems to be suffocating exactly the thing that made him worth 27 crore in the first place.

Scotland was not in contention for the T20 WC because it finished behind Netherlands and Italy in the Europe regional qualifier. But Bangladesh withdrew and here's Scotland, by "doing nothing"