KL Rahul has been all but ruled out of Delhi Capitals’ opener against Lucknow Super Giants at the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium, Visakhapatnam on Monday.
The premier India wicketkeeper-batter has joined the camp with his captain Axar Patel confirming that Rahul may or may not be available for the match due to personal reasons.
Delhi Capitals’ new head coach Hemang Badani kept Rahul’s batting position is suspense.
“Obviously, he joined the team,” Axar said of Rahul’s availability. “We don’t know yet [if he’ll play]. Right now we don’t know if he is available or not.”
Axar took over the DC captaincy from Pant, who was sold to LSG, and said that the team needs to adapt with the growing trend of high-scoring total.
“Nowadays cricket has changed a lot,” Axar said. “Mostly IPL is more about batsman’s game, fours and sixes. So we have to evolve as a team. At the end of the day, I don’t want to complicate things. As captain I told the group that cricket is a game, keep it simple. A good yorker is a good yorker ball and if your execution is good, then you will be fine. So I am not telling them too much that you should go for this and that. I am just asking them to keep it simple, that’s my strategy throughout the tournament.
“We learn from the last season, I said that cricket has evolved too much. From the last season we learned that you have to be ahead of the game. You can’t be chasing the game. It’s not like in the powerplay we have to swing the ball or we have to bowl length balls. We can even start from two-three slower balls. So it’s not any particular plan for any batsman. We have to change the plan according to the situation which I learned from the last season,” he added.