NEW DELHI: Delhi Capitals were dealt a big blow on Tuesday when their captain Shreyas Iyer picked up a major injury in the first ODI against England.
Iyer dislocated his left shoulder while fielding and is set to undergo surgery, which will reportedly rule him out for a minimum of four months.
Last season, Iyer captained DC to their maiden IPL final.
IPL 2021 starts on April 9 with DC playing their first match against Chennai Super Kings on April 10.
TimesofIndia.com ran a poll for the upcoming IPL season asking fans to vote for who they feel should lead DC in Iyer’s absence.
The first question was: Who should lead DC in the absence of Shreyas Iyer? The options were R Ashwin, Ajinkya Rahane, Shikhar Dhawan, Rishabh Pant, Steve Smith and Prithvi Shaw.
3916 votes were polled in favour of Rahane. This was not surprising because he recently led India to a magnificent Test series victory in Australia.
Former Australian captain Steve Smith, who was bought for Rs 2.20 crores, just Rs 20 lakhs more than his base price in the last player auction, got the second most number of votes at 2151.
R Ashwin, who led Kings XI Punjab in 2018 and 2019 was third on the list with 1893 votes.
1073 votes were polled in favour of wicketkeeper-batsman Rishabh Pant, the hero of the Gabba Test in Australia.
Dhawan and Shaw got 686 and 358 votes respectively.

The second question was: Can Delhi Capitals put up a good show again this year, despite not having Iyer’s services?
8944 fans were optimistic that last year’s runners-up DC will do well again this time despite not having Iyer’s services. 1123 fans thought otherwise.

The third question was: Which of these teams has the best chance to break their IPL title jinx this year? The options given were of course the three teams who are yet to win the IPL title – Delhi Capitals, Punjab Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore.
4547 votes were polled in favour of RCB, with fans hoping that Virat Kohli finally gets his hands on the IPL trophy that he and his team have now been chasing across 13 previous editions.
With 4152 votes, Delhi Capitals, who were runners-up last season were a close second and Punjab Kings got 1365 votes.

The fourth and the last question was: Are you excited about the possibility of IPL 2022 having 10 teams?
7362 votes were polled in the affirmative, meaning that the fans were really looking forward to the addition of more teams to the IPL extravaganza. 2693 fans voted for the ‘No’ option.

Whenever there is an addition to the number of teams, the number of matches will also of course go up and most fans seem to like the idea of a longer IPL carnival.