Toss Delhi Capitals chose to bowl vs Sunrisers Hyderabad

Delhi Capitals captain Axar Patel maintained his 100% strike rate at the toss in IPL 2026, and asked Sunrisers Hyderabad to bat first, something they relished in their previous match. However, SRH’s captain Ishan Kishan did admit the decision wasn’t as straightforward in this match. He would probably have wanted to field himself, especially with some cloud cover at the time of the toss.

DC strengthened their shaky batting by bringing in Nitish Rana at the expense of Auqib Nabi. That meant Rana himself and Tristan Stubbs were DC’s bowling options outside the five main bowlers. There could well be a case for bringing Rana in to bowl offspin at the three left-hand batters at the top. Nabi did remain on the bench, though, but Ashutosh Sharma and Karun Nair were the likelier candidates to be Impact Player.

SRH added left-arm spinner Harsh Dubey to their first XI, which meant one out of Praful Hinge and Dilshan Madushanka was going to come in as Impact Player. They did have Harshal Patel on the bench as well, just in case the pitch turned out to be a really slow one.

Sunrisers Hyderabad 1 Abhishek Sharma, 2 Travis Head, 3 Ishan Kishan (capt), 4 Heinrich Klaasen, 5 Salil Arora (wk), 6 Aniket Verma, 7 Nitish Kumar Reddy, 8 Shivang Kumar, 9 Harsh Dubey, 10 Sakib Hussain, 11 Eshan Malinga

SRH bench R Smaran, Praful Hinge, Liam Livingstone, Dilshan Madushanka, Harshal Patel

Delhi Capitals 1 Pathum Nissanka, 2 KL Rahul (wk), 3 Sameer Rizvi, 4 Axar Patel (capt), 5 David Miller, 6 Tristan Stubbs, 7 Nitish Rana, 8 Lungi Ngidi, 9 Kuldeep Yadav, 10 T Natarajan, 11 Mukesh Kumar

DC bench Tripurana Vijay, Ashutosh Sharma, Karun Nair, Dushmantha Chameera, Auqib Nabi