Australian speedster Mitchell Starc starred with a brilliant five-wicket haul for Delhi Capitals in their clash against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium, Visakhapatnam on Sunday, March 30. Starc, playing in his first season for DC, ended his spell with figures of 5/35 in 3.4 overs.

Starc has become just the second DC bowler to have taken a five-wicket haul in IPL history as he emulated the feat of Amit Mishra, who took 5/17 for the then Delhi Daredevils in their fixture against Deccan Chargers in IPL 2008.

Starc is the first overseas player to take a fifer for DC. The left-arm quick is just the fourth Australian after James Faulkner, Andrew Tye and Adam Zampa to take a five-for in IPL. This was also his maiden five-wicket haul in T20 cricket.

With his impressive performance against the Sunrisers, Starc also completed 200 wickets in T20s. He needed only four scalps to reach the milestone and got there with his fourth wicket of Harshal Patel. 

The Aussie pacer then removed the impact player Wiaan Mulder to complete his fifer and bowl SRH out for 163 in 18.4 overs. 

SRH had won the toss and had opted to bat first. “We’ll have a bat. Afternoon game, tends to be hot. Looks like a good wicket, put a big score hopefully. That was the trend last year – we put on some big scores. So, playing to our strengths. We weren’t too worried either way. 

“Playing the way we do, you got to accept that some games it’s not going to work out. One positive from the last game is we were a long way from our best, few things went wrong and we still got almost 200 runs. The boys are still positive. so keen to get out there. Zeeshan comes in for Simarjeet,” SRH captain Cummins said at the toss.

“We would have batted as well as it’s an afternoon game. In the last game, the ball was doing more in the second innings. We’ll look to restrict them to a low total. We have played one game here, we were working on our plans based on our opponents. We need to be brave as a bowling unit. We have certain plans and we have an aggressive mindset. One change, Sameer Rizvi is out, KL Rahul is in,” DC skipper Axar Patel said at the toss.

Sunrisers Hyderabad’s Playing XI: Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen(w), Aniket Verma, Abhinav Manohar, Pat Cummins(c), Zeeshan Ansari, Harshal Patel, Mohammed Shami

Delhi Capitals’ Playing XI: Jake Fraser-McGurk, Faf du Plessis, Abishek Porel, KL Rahul(w), Axar Patel(c), Tristan Stubbs, Vipraj Nigam, Mitchell Starc, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohit Sharma, Mukesh Kumar