Delhi Capitals (DC) have had their problems in IPL 2026 with their home turf at Arun Jaitley Stadium. After beating Rajasthan Royals (RR) in Delhi on Sunday, Hemang Badani, their head coach, said “we’ve stopped discussing the surface”, and as far as he is concerned, “we play this venue as an away venue”.

Badani has spoken about it before, calling playing at home “a bit of an up-and-down curve“, and imploring the BCCI to “look after the surfaces”. Five losses and just two wins at home this season make Badani’s grouse seem justified: they have once had their 264 chased down with seven balls in hand, and in the very next match, been bowled out for 75.

“If you’re able to break the season into two halves – about what’s happened at home and what’s happened away – we’ve had four wins in six games away and we’ve primarily struggled at home [two wins in seven games],” Badani said at the press interaction after the game. “From last year, we’ve had five at this venue plus we’ve had seven now, which is 12 games, and we’ve only had three wins, one of them being a Super Over. That pretty much tells you how the surface has been for us.

“It hasn’t been conducive to our style of play. We’ve many a times not been able to figure out what the surface is like and that’s the reason why you see those results and those numbers.

“You generally would ideally look at the grass that’s available in the surface, the texture of the surface, the colour of the surface. But each time we’ve turned up here, we’ve got something very different. So it is what it is. We accept it and move on.”

Badani explained that the three pitches in Delhi the matches have been held on have not been the same on more than once occasion.

“We are getting bowled out for 60; we are getting bowled out for 150; we are also scoring 260. We don’t know how Pitch No. 4 will play, how Pitch No. 5 will play, how Pitch No. 6 will play,” he said. “We have played on three pitches and all of them have been different each time. So it’s difficult to prepare. When you know this pitch will have a par score of 180, or a par score of 200, or a par score of 250, you structure the side accordingly. But here… whatever is happening is happening.”

Though they won on Sunday to keep their hopes of making the playoffs alive, DC weren’t entirely satisfied with the pitch they got.

“Speaking of this game, I think even if you look at their innings, they were 160 for 2 [after 14 overs] and then they hardly got runs in the end – I think they got about 33 in the last six and we picked up [six more] wickets,” Badani said. “The same happened to us where we slowed down a little bit but we were cautious because we had a [target] available to us. They had to set a target and we were just looking to create the game because the ball was starting to do reverse. The ball was holding a bit in the surface [too]. It wasn’t easy to bat once the ball got older and hence [we decided] to take the game deep; go hard at the top but take the game deep in the end.”

The question had been asked before, and Badani was asked about it again: should the BCCI allow the IPL teams to decide how their pitches should be, to give them home advantage?

“If it has to be a consistent decision for all [then yes], but it should at least be where you know at least what to expect,” Badani said. “Here, we don’t know what the surface will do.”