Pant cited the team's extensive injury list as the major reason behind their dismal IPL campaign.
After LSG were knocked out of the playoffs race, Pant highlighted the unsettled bowling unit of his team and conceded they couldn’t fill the gaps owing to injuries.
LSG missed the core group of fast bowlers at the start of the season as Mohsin Khan had an ACL injury, while Mayank Yadav was recovering from a back injury.
Apart from them, Akash Deep was also dealing with a back injury in the beginning of the season and Avesh Khan had a knee injury. Hence, they struggled to field their best bowling unit and were forced to keep on tweaking their playing combination.
Reacting to Pant’s comment, former India cricketer Mohammad Kaif delivered a blunt response, saying that LSG think tank shouldn't have retained such injury-prone players.
"I would rather pay money to retain players who can play the full season. LSG's entire bowling attack is injury-prone. I'm not saying injuries don't happen, but for players who are more susceptible to them, stop retaining them for big money. Instead, pick them up at the auction," Kaif said after the match.
LSG suffered a comprehensive six-wicket defeat against Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) at Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow on Monday (May 19). It was their seventh loss in 12 outings this season and as a result, they failed to make it to the playoffs for the second successive edition.
Following the match, Pant said the voids left by key players' absence led to their downfall in the ongoing IPL season.
"Definitely it could have been one of our best seasons, but coming into the tournament, we had a lot of gaps, injuries, and as a team we decided to not talk about that, but it became difficult to fill those gaps for us," Pant said while speaking at the post-match presentation.
"The way we planned the auction, if we had had the same bowling... but this is cricket, sometimes things go your way and sometimes they don't, we take pride in the way we played and take the positives from the season rather than the negative side," he added.
(With NDTV Inputs)