Delhi Capitals Squad
Some of the choices they made when it came to building their squads might have hurt them. In 2008, they let Virat Kohli go – the logic being that they had Virender Sehwag, Shikhar Dhawan, Gautam Gambhir, Tillakaratne Dilshan and AB de Villiers in their ranks. Then, after three years with the team, which included lots of runs and competent leadership in the 2010 season, Gambhir was released. Kohli, of course, hasn’t won the IPL with the Royal Challengers Bangalore yet, but is the highest run getter in the competition’s history, while Gambhir has led the Kolkata Knight Riders to two IPL titles. The list of players Delhi have let go over the years also includes David Warner, de Villiers and Andre Russell.

Season by season
2008 - fourth
Delhi started well, with two wins on the trot, and managed to win enough games - seven out of 14 - to finish fourth on the points table. But the Rajasthan Royals, who Delhi had beaten in their first game, were on a roll, and beat Delhi in the semi-final on the way to the title.

2009 - third
Delhi were the in-form team in the group phase of the competition, played in South Africa. They won ten of their first 14 games, and topped the table going into the knockouts, where they lost to eventual champions Deccan Chargers in the semi-final.

2010 - fifth
Delhi might have expected to build on the momentum of their first two seasons, but after winning their first two games, they only won five more, to finish tied on points with three teams behind Mumbai Indians and Deccan Chargers. Their net run rate worked against them, and the Chennai Super Kings and the Royal Challengers Bangalore went through.

2011 - tenth
When it all went wrong for the first time. The Pune Warriors India and the Kochi Tuskers Kerala joined the IPL, making it a ten-team affair, and the two new teams and Delhi made up the bottom three, with Delhi last.

2012 - third
The big-ticket stars - Sehwag, Pietersen, Jayawardene, Morkel, Warner - all came good, and Delhi ticked over like a well-oiled machine, winning 11 of their 16 group-stage games to finish top of the table. But it would be so near yet so far again for them: losses to KKR and CSK knocked them out.

2013 - ninth
Delhi fell into perhaps their worst slump, with three wins and 13 losses. Their first win came in their seventh game, against the Mumbai Indians, and then, after two wins, there was another run of six straight defeats to end their campaign.

2014 - eighth
Another season, another woeful performance. If they won three and lost 13 the previous year, this time, with the tournament back to eight teams, they won two and lost 12, the two wins coming in their first five games, in the UAE. Delhi ended the tournament with a string of nine straight losses.

2015 - seventh
This was around the time when nothing Delhi did really worked. Their performance was marginally better than in 2014, but five wins and eight losses only allowed them to finish above the Kings XI Punjab, another team that had made a name for finishing in the bottom half of the table.

2016 - sixth
Delhi’s prospects saw a small uptick, in that after having languished at the bottom, they moved one step up the ladder, with seven wins and seven defeats. Quinton de Kock starred with 445 runs; legspinner Amit Mishra and another South African import, Chris Morris, took 26 wickets between them.

2017 - sixth
Delhi hit a plateau with another sixth-place finish, though with six wins and eight losses this time. Still, with Sanju Samson, Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer all scoring over 300 runs for the season, there was reason to believe that the core of a strong team was coming together.

2018 - eighth
Pant slammed 684 runs in 14 innings at a strike rate of 173.60, Iyer chipped in with 411 runs, and there were handy contributions from Vijay Shankar, Prithvi Shaw and Trent Boult (18 wickets), but Delhi still lost nine games and won only five. That meant a bottom-place finish for them for the fourth time.

2019 - third
Dhawan returned to his home team, and between them, he, Pant and Iyer and Shaw made close to 1500 runs. Kagiso Rabada led the bowling, with 25 wickets. This time, Delhi won nine games to finish at No. 3 on the table. They beat Sunrisers Hyderabad in the eliminator - their first win in the knockouts ever - but were then knocked out themselves by CSK.

Team records
Highest totals Lowest totals Most runs Most wickets
DD current squad
Shreyas Iyer
Ravichandran Ashwin
Avesh Khan
Alex Carey (OP)
Tushar Deshpande
Shikhar Dhawan

Shimron Hetmyer (OP)
Sandeep Lamichhane (OP)
Amit Mishra
Anrich Nortje (OP)
Rishabh Pant
Axar Patel

Harshal Patel
Keemo Paul (OP)
Kagiso Rabada (OP)
Ajinkya Rahane
Daniel Sams (OP)
Ishant Sharma

Mohit Sharma
Prithvi Shaw
Marcus Stoinis (OP)
Lalit Yadav
Jason Roy (OP)
Chris Woakes (OP)