Hardik Pandya leaves even before his own DRS review is over in India vs South Africa 3rd T20I

Hardik Pandya has struggled to get going with the bat so far during India’s T20I series tour against South Africa. The third T20I, held at Centurion, saw Pandya dismissed leg before wicket (LBW) by Keshav Maharaj for 18 runs off 16 balls. However, while Pandya had reviewed the umpire’s decision, he decided to leave the field of play even before the review was completed. Seeing that he hadn’t hit any bat and was stuck in front of the wicket, Pandya decided to go back even before tracking the ball started.

It turned out that Pandya was indeed out LBW, with a hawk’s eye showing that the ball would have hit the wickets.

Pandya’s dismissal ended another disappointing blow in the T20I series. The all-rounder was dismissed for just two runs in the first T20I. In the second over, Pandya was forced to play with the tails after the middle-order collapsed. As a result, he faced as many as 45 balls, but was only able to score 39 of them.

The third T20I took Pandya’s tally in the four-match series to 59 runs off 67 balls.

Despite Pandya’s failure with the bat, India took advantage of Tilak Varma’s sensational century to post a total of 219. In the end, India ended up winning the match by 11 runs. Pandya gave away 50 runs with the ball – including 24 runs in an over from Marco Jansen – but collected the wicket of David Miller.

Pandya has one more T20I to improve his series record.

The all-rounder is also the captain of Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Mumbai Indians (MI), who will head into the IPL 2025 mega auction with a purse of INR 45 crore, after retaining five senior Indian players, under the form of Pandya, Jasprit Bumrah, Suryakumar Yadav, Rohit Sharma and Tilak Varma.

The IPL 2025 mega auction will take place in Jeddah on November 24-25.