DC Squad: It’s a very new look Delhi Capitals team that is heading into this fresh cycle beginning with the IPL 2025. It’s a 10th permanent captain in 18 years of the IPL’s history as Axar Patel takes over the mantle, the team unable to hang on to a local hero who made his breakthrough at this team as Rishabh Pant bid farewell ahead of the mega-auction. Axar leads a team which has some names the Delhi Capitals fans will be used to — Kuldeep Yadav and Tristan Stubbs having played key roles — but it’s otherwise a fresh, new unit, who will be looking to reverse the poor fortune of the team from the nation’s capital and re-write the script of this franchise’s history.
Delhi’s biggest purchases in the auction were KL Rahul and Mitchell Starc, two players who know all about performing in this tournament and bring plenty of experience to the table to go with the youth present in DC’s ranks. These are the five world class T20 players in Delhi’s team, who they can supplement with plenty of talent across the board. T Natarajan has consistently been one of the best Indian pacers in the IPL during his career, and he’s finally making a move away from Hyderabad. His accuracy in the death overs could be a gamechanger at the Arun Jaitley Stadium with its small boundaries, and provides depth bowling to a unit that tended to be expensive last year. Mukesh Kumar also makes a return via RTM, and will provide support with the new ball to Starc and with the older ball to Natarajan. Being a support act will be a much better role for this player than having to be the spearhead, as he has been for DC in recent years.
On the batting front, it will be interesting to see if Jake Fraser-McGurk can recreate his form from last year, where he was the batter with the highest strike-rate across the tournament, and showed an ability to set DC up for wins in the powerplay alone, inspiring their late resurgence. However, it has been a quiet few months since that breakout tournament for the hard-hitting Aussie as his unorthodox technique has been slightly exposed. Thankfully for DC, they have overseas batting depth present in Faf du Plessis and Donovan Ferreira, with a replacement for Harry Brook also yet to be announced.
In the middle order, it will be interesting to see if Abhishek Porel continues to get games after his retention, with the wicketkeeper looking like a real talent, and well-suited to batting at three in this team. Tristan Stubbs could bat at four or five, Axar Patel could very well bump himself up the order to extend the batting, and Ashutosh Sharma and Sameer Rizvi provide that late-order hitting that every team is so hungry for.
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