IPL 2023: David Warner leads DC to win over KKR but batting problems persist for Capitals

By no means, Delhi Capitals’ (DC) four-wicket win over Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in Match 28 of Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 perfect. In fact, it was far from perfect. And yet, somehow, David Warner and Co managed to scrape past Nitish Rana’s men in a match that was delayed for 90 minutes due to rain at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi.

IPL 2023: Full coverage | Points table | Schedule | Results | Orange Cap | Purple Cap​

On Thursday, it was the Delhi Capitals bowlers who performed clinically well than their batters (Barring David Warner). Axar Patel has a habit of producing big scores with the bat, but on Thursday, it was his day to finish the match for his team.

And he did so, with an unbeaten 22-ball 19. Manish Pandey got runs for DC but probably not at the desired strike-rate that his team would have wanted. He managed to find a couple of boundaries, but was eventually dismissed for 21 off 23 balls (A strike-rate of 91.30).

And Prithvi Shaw, who came into bat as an Impact Player, failed to make much of an impact after he was dismissed for 13 by Varun Chakaravarthy.

Most of DC’s batters failed to fire, and yet again, the onus was on David Warner, who notched up his fourth half-century of the ongoing season.

DAVID WARNER IS BACK.

Fifty from 33 balls including 11 fours, the main man running the show for Delhi pic.twitter.com/cvoCQ65vIB

— Johns. (@CricCrazyJohns) April 20, 2023

Once again, DC may have been a bit too dependant on Warner, but was it a good game that they won?

Warner, though, felt it was just an ‘okay game’ for DC to win.

“Finally. We scrapped our way to it. Over to Hyderabad. We are really proud of the bowling unit. We did exceptionally well to get wickets in the powerplay. We lost wickets in cluster. We are very honest to each other. We discussed about areas to improve upon. We played an Okay game,” Warner said at the presentation ceremony.

Warner has only one request to his players with this message: for the batters to improve their scores and the runs would come by accordingly.

So much so that, the difference among the top two DC batters this season is considerably big. Warner leads the Capitals’ charts for batters with 285 runs, and behind him is Axar Patel, with 148 runs. And third on their team batting chart is Manish Pandey with 97 runs.

Warner’s strike-rate a worry for DC?

While Warner has notched up four half-centuries this season already, the DC skipper’s overall strike rate, of 120.76, might be a worrying sign for the Delhi Capitals.

#DC – Dependable Captain!