Pant's bat could not do wonders, South Delhi defeated Old Delhi to register the first win in history

In the first game of the Delhi Premier League T20, South Delhi Superstars defeated Old Delhi by three wickets at the Arun Jaitley Stadium.

Old Delhi 6 scored 197/3 in 20 overs with the support of Arpit Rana, after which South Delhi Superstars easily chased the target in 19.1 overs. In the match, everyone was keeping an eye out for the captain of Delhi Capitals, though he didn't do something special and scored 35 runs in 32 balls.

The chase of 198 runs by South Delhi Superstars kicked off in right earnest as they were 73 for no loss on the board with imaginative batting by their openers, Priyansh Arya and Sarthak Ray. Ray departed to a catch and bowled by Shivam Sharma in the seventh over after scoring 41 off 26 deliveries, whereas Arya got to his 50 in the 12th over in 27 balls. Captain Ayush Badoni smashed four back-to-back sixes of Ankit Bhadana in the same over and accelerated the team's score to 140/1. In the next over, he got tooved when wicketkeeper Arpit Rana easily accepted the catch behind the stumps off Sharma's ball. He made 57 runs from 30 balls with the help of three fours and four sixes in his inning.

It was then Dhruv Singh's turn to be sent back cheaply out of the battlefield, while Badoni creamed his half-century off 25 balls in the 14th over. South Delhi remained 13 runs short of the target with two overs in the innings. Vision Panchal and Digvesh Rathi displayed some fine cricket to get their team through with five wickets falling and five balls remaining. Earlier, batting first, Old Delhi 6 were asked and suffered an initial jolt as Manjeet fell in the third over.

They got an early breakthrough when Divij Mehra completed an amazing sharp catch at short third man to send Kunwar Bidhuri back to the hut. But Arpit Rana and Old Delhi's star wicketkeeper-batsman Rishabh Pant propped up by 58/1 at the end of the powerplay supported the innings. Rana completed his half-century off 37 balls in the 11th over when he and Pant had taken their team past the 100-run mark in the 13th over. However, Rana went out the next over, with Badoni claiming the wicket in the very over. Soon Pant too left in the 15th over, bid away by Kunwar Bidhuri after scoring 35 from 32 balls. Vansh Bedi and Lalit Yadav accelerated the run rate when, during the match, after 15 overs, Old Delhi 6's score was 129-3 into 197 hits in the stipulated 20 overs, scoring a bulk load of boundaries in the final finish overs.