After three good seasons between 2019-2021 in which they made it to playoffs consecutively and also reached the final once, Delhi Capitals narrowly missed out on the knockout stage last season after finishing fifth in the table.
IPL 2023: Full coverage | Points table | Schedule | Results | Orange Cap | Purple Cap
While the initial plan would have been to come roaring back and reach the playoffs again, DC were the first team to get eliminated from the race in IPL 2023. They finished with just five wins from 14 matches.
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The people working behind the scenes will have a clear answer why things went so bad, but from the outside one can safely say that Delhi Capitals became a victim of mediocrity in all departments.
Pant’s absence felt big time
Rishabh Pant’s absence due to the car crash he suffered in December was a massive blow but the poor batting form of stars from the 2022 season also hurt DC badly.
Prithvi Shaw, Mitchell Marsh and Rovman Powell together scored over 750 runs last year, but this season they only made 241 combined.
Phil Salt and Rilee Rossouw failed to fill in the gap left by Pant.
Lack of runs is what hurt them the most.
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Shaw was also dropped midway through the tournament after scoring 47 runs in the first six innings. His lack of runs adversely impacted stand-in captain David Warner’s strike rate. Warner accumulated 516 runs with six fifties in 2023 but his strike rate went from 150.52 in 2022 to 131.63.
Essentially, his runs didn’t have the desired impact.
Same story in bowling department
It’s the all-rounders who lead the chart for Delhi. Marsh with 12 wickets in 9 matches leads the wicket-takers tally for DC. He’s 20th on the overall list, however. Axar Patel is second with 11 from 14 games.
The full-time bowlers had a poor season.
Kuldeep Yadav scalped 10 wickets in 14 games while Anrich Nortje (10) and Khaleel Ahmed (9) struggled with injuries.
With little to write about the bowlers as well, there is no surprise in how DC’s finished their campaign.
Bright spots
The biggest bright spot for DC was Axar Patel. Apart from taking 11 wickets, he also smashed 283 runs from the lower order including a 22-ball fifty against Mumbai Indians, the fifth-fastest half-century for DC.
While coach Ricky Ponting wanted to use him as a finisher, DC missed a trick by not promoting Axar up in the batting order considering how their top and middle orders failed miserably.
It was a risk worth taking.
Another positive for DC in the season was the comeback of Ishant Sharma. Getting a game midway through the season due to an injury to Khaleel, the veteran pacer took two wickets for 19 in a player-of-match performance as DC defeated Kolkata Knight Riders for their first win of the season in April after five straight losses.
Overall, Ishant finished with 10 wickets from eight matches.
The planning for the next season would begin soon in the DC camp and it’s the batters and the overseas players who would be under the microscope.
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