Delhi Capitals (DC) batter Abhishek Porel credited Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, mentor Kevin Pietersen and head coach Hemang Badani for backing him. In his first match of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 last month against the Lucknow Super Giants, the DC batter fetched a duck after Shardul Thakur accounted for his wicket.
But on April 22 against the same opposition, Porel showed his class, scoring 51 runs off 36 balls with the help of five fours and one six. On the back of his knock, DC chased down 160 and won the match by eight wickets at the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow.
‘Everyone backed me’
Porel admitted that he was under pressure after his duck against LSG last month. But he thanked the DC support staff for showing enough faith in him to bounce back.
“See, now it depends on the wicket, of course, but I know what my game is, and the support staff knows it too. The support staff obviously tells me to play freely, not to take too much pressure, because they’re there for me – it’s not like I’m alone. Even the captain told me, after a couple of rough innings initially – like in the first match when I got out for a duck – I did feel a bit of pressure, thinking the season hasn’t started well,” Porel said in the post-match press conference.
“But at that time, everyone backed me – KP backed me a lot, Hemang Sir backed me, the captain backed me. He kept telling me, ‘You batted really well against LSG last year,’ so that sort of motivation from the senior players really helps. Like even Kuldeep bhai, he says it too – that my batting is really good, that I’ve got great timing.”
“So somewhere, I feel that when others back you like that – even if you yourself aren’t backing yourself at the moment – it’s very motivating. You start thinking, ‘If they believe in me, why shouldn’t I believe in myself?’ And I think that’s showing in the results now. I feel like I’m playing freely, playing my natural game, focusing on my strengths,” Porel added.
It was Porel’s 69-run partnership with KL Rahul for the second wicket that laid the platform for DC in their run-chase. With their sixth win of the competition, DC moved to second in the table with 12 points and a net run rate of +0.657.
Porel is currently the second-highest run-scorer for DC in IPL 2025, having notched 225 runs from eight games, averaging 32.14 at a strike-rate of 146.10.
