Tough fight ahead for Delhi Capitals in ‘City of Nawabs’

Lucknow’s competent bowling unit of Digvesh Rathi, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan and Shardul Thakur has choked the opposition without much fanfare this season

Lucknow: Delhi Capitals will expect a more productive effort from their openers when they visit the ‘City of Nawabs’ to face an increasingly confident Lucknow Super Giants in an IPL match here on Tuesday.

The Capitals’ opening has been a bit of roulette so far this season with Faf du Plessis, Jake Fraser-McGurk, Abhishek Porel and the latest entrant Karun Nair coming in at the pole position. In fact, in the last five matches, they had three different opening combinations between those four batters, producing partnerships of 23, 34, 0, 9, 0.

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It also had to do with the injury of Du Plessis, and the South African’s fitness will be closely watched ahead of this match. Thus far, it looked like a minor glitch because the Capitals have won five of their seven matches, and the middle-order under the aegis of KL Rahul too worked like a well-oiled machine.

But Lucknow’s competent bowling unit of Digvesh Rathi, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan and Shardul Thakur, though he is a bit expensive, has choked the opposition without much fanfare.

The way Avesh excelled in the 18th and 20th over against the Rajasthan Royals in LSG’s two-run win is an example of that. It might have also doubled the confidence of the Super Giants that they can pull off wins from any situation.

Therefore, the Capitals will not like to leave the task of building the innings to Rahul and his middle-order colleagues as they have been doing so often this time. Instead, the DC management will like to see their middle-order driving in the early advantage given to them by the top two.

In contrast, the Lucknow outfit has a solid top three with Mitchell Marsh, Nicholas Pooran and Aiden Markram firing more often than not and it has given them an edge over opponents in the Power Play phase.

Travails of skippers Pant, Axar
It’s ironic that the personal form of DC and LSG skippers is going in exactly the opposite direction of their teams’ fortunes.

Both DC and LSG have 10 points and a win will keep them safely perched in the higher echelons of the points table ahead of the jostlers. But the lukewarm form of skipper Rishabh Pant has been a massive issue for LSG. He has merely 106 runs from eight games.

But much like LSG, the Delhi side too will have some concerns about their skipper — Axar Patel. Axar has led well and made 140 runs at a strike-rate of 159, but those improvements have masked his diminishing returns as a bowler — just a solitary wicket from seven matches at an economy of 9.36. It seems that the added responsibility of captaining the side and the demands batting higher up in the order have forced Axar to neglect his primary skills.

The DC management might want him to address this disparity at the earliest so that they can have more variety in their attack.