The two candidates for the Delhi Capitals captaincy in the forthcoming Indian Premier League season are senior keeper-batter KL Rahul and top all-rounder Axar Patel, with the versatile Gujarati player holding a slight advantage. It is believed that after waiting for the Champions Trophy to conclude, the franchise executives would reveal the identity of their new captain in the coming days.
The Delhi Capitals will go to Visakhapatnam for their opening two games after a brief training and simulation camp in Delhi. On March 17 and 18, Axar, Rahul, Kuldeep Yadav, Tristan Stubbs of South Africa, Australian Jake Fraser McGurk, and Mitchell Starc will meet in Visakhapatnam.
Depending on the due date, the older player can miss one or two games because Rahul and his wife, Athiya Shetty, are expecting their first child. Rahul, who will be wearing the Delhi blues for the first time, is not as likely to be the team's captain as 31-year-old Axar, who is entering his seventh season with the Capitals and has played 150 IPL games. He has taken 123 wickets at an economy rate of 7.28 and scored 1653 runs at a strike rate of nearly 131.
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Rahul, however, has been an IPL captain for a number of years and has previously captained the Punjab Kings and the Lucknow Super Giants. Despite missing the majority of one of those seasons due to injury, LSG made it to two playoffs during his tenure with the team. Mostly while batting in the top three, Rahul, who turns 33 on April 18, has amassed 4683 runs at a strike-rate of 134+. In 132 games, he has also scored four hundreds.
Despite his much criticized strike rate in power plays, Rahul had an incredible 2018–2024 season, scoring over 500 runs in six of seven seasons. He only scored less in 2023, when he scored 274 runs in nine games prior to suffering an injury. He has scored more than 600 runs in four of the six seasons. Rahul has been the captain of the IPL for a few years, but Axar has not established himself yet. It is quite impossible to have a foreign player as captain of the Delhi Capitals due to the squad's makeup, unless you are looking at Stubbs, who is likely to be a sure pick regardless of the circumstances.