Delhi Capitals defeated Lucknow Super Giants by eight wickets in the ongoing IPL 2025. The hosts had a poor outing with the bat, as barring openers Aiden Markram and Mitchell Marsh, none of them could step up on the occasion. Captain Rishabh Pant, who was bought for INR 27 crore in the mega-auction, was expected to take control of the batting but interestingly, he arrived at number seven, and departed without opening his tally.
Courtesy of Markram’s 52 and Marsh’s 45, Lucknow posted 159 runs in the first innings. For Delhi, Mukesh Kumar had a stunning day, picking up four wickets. Meanwhile, 159 was never enough, especially against a quality side like Delhi’s and the visitors also played extremely well, particularly Abishek Porel and KL Rahul, who scored a half-century each and won the match for them.
Delhi had no problem whatsoever chasing 160 runs and they were extremely calm in their approach. Opener Porel was terrific, scoring 51 runs off 36 balls. After the match, he revealed the importance of capitalising the powerplay and which played a massive part in helping DC gain momentum.
“I wanted to utilise the powerplay, that was the planning, it was a big ground, so the idea was to find the gaps. If it was in my zone, the plan was to hit a six. We were talking that it’s a matter of one or two overs, we wanted to play as less dot balls as possible. So, the discussion with KL (Rahul) was that we can makeup anytime and we wanted to play the ball on its merit,” Porel said after the match.
After his dismissal, Rahul took over and made an unbeaten 57 runs off 42 balls. He finished the game with a six and that was arguably a statement against his former team, which released him ahead of the mega-auction.
Axar Patel, meanwhile, supported him well, scoring 34* runs off 20 balls. With the win, Delhi registered their sixth win of the season and remained second on the points table, below Gujarat Titans, who have a better Net Run Rate.
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