Suryakumar Yadav and Axar Patel (Image credit: BCCI/IPL) NEW DELHI: Shortly before the toss, broadcasters announced that Mumbai Indians captain Hardik Pandya will not feature in the match against Delhi Capitals at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi. Seconds after the announcement, Suryakumar Yadav – smiling, chewing gum and wearing a blue and gold jersey – came out with a team sheet, shook hands with Ravi Shastri and then greeted Delhi Capitals captain Axar Patel.A loud cheer followed from the Delhi crowd as they saw their T20 World Cup winning captain Surya.The big question was: why did Surya lead the team and why was Hardik absent in such an important clash?The moment Axar won the toss and chose to field against Mumbai Indians and talked about his team combination, attention quickly shifted to Surya.“(Hardik Pandya) He is not well, he is not looking well, so he was not fit for today’s game. So he just stepped into the shoes today,” said Surya, who was the stand-in captain for the Delhi Capitals game.
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Sameer Rizvi on batting: simple mindset, big impact for DC Mumbai Indians started their IPL 2026 campaign with a six-wicket win over Kolkata Knight Riders.Mumbai Indians brought in Deepak Chahar in place of Pandya.“(On the win against KKR) If you win the first game in 13-14 years, there’s a lot of positivity in the camp and we’re very happy, but here it’s a very different place to the Wankhede. We have to take good responsibility and have a good game. (On the surface) It looks good, the tossing was irrelevant. We wanted to bat here, yeah, we wanted to bat first, we wanted to bat first. Really good when we batted first and we defended Deepak Chahar, Corbin Bosch comes in, that’s a tactical change in the last game at the Wankhede, and Mitch Santner comes in for Allah Ghazanfar.Axar went with the same side against the Bombay Indians. “I decided to bowl first. First match at home, I want to see how the wicket behaves. It looks a bit dry, a bit hard. We chased well in the last match. To chase down the target from 26/4 in the powerplay, it gives the group a lot of confidence. Even the top order batsmen know there are always lower order batsmen. Our DC supports can play the match if they fail.” same team,” Axar said.
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teams:Delhi Capitals (Playing XI): KL Rahul(w), Pathum Nissanka, Nitish Rana, Axar Patel(c), Tristan Stubbs, David Miller, Vipraj Nigam, Lungi Ngidi, Kuldeep Yadav, T Natarajan, Mukesh KumarMumbai Indians (Playing XI): Rohit Sharma, Ryan Rickelton (w), Tilak Varma, Suryakumar Yadav (c), Naman Dhir, Sherfane Rutherford, Mitchell Santner, Corbin Bosch, Shardul Thakur, Deepak Chahar, Jasprit Bumrah.Here are the Impact substitutes for both teams:Delhi Capitals Impact Subs: Ashutosh Sharma, Auqib Nabi Dar, Sameer Rizvi, Dushmantha Chameera, Karun NairMumbai Indians Impact subs: Mayank Markande, Robin Minz, Raj Bawa, Trent Boult, Ashwani Kumar
