Vaas took the only eight-wicket haul in ODI history, and he is set to coach Delhi Capitals’ fast bowlers

Chaminda Vaas has been at Delhi Capitals’ preparatory camp and trials in New Delhi, and he is expected to be the franchise’s fast bowling coach for IPL 2027. Munaf Patel, who held the job for the last two seasons, is on his way out. Delhi have not announced any of it yet.

If it goes through, Vaas will be the fourth new face in a coaching staff that has been taken apart and rebuilt almost entirely.

Almost nobody survives the reshuffle

Sourav Ganguly has been lined up as head coach since June, when reports of Delhi’s overhaul first appeared. Yuvraj Singh is joining the staff alongside him. Amit Mishra, who took 110 wickets in 103 matches for the franchise between 2008 and 2021 and is still its leading wicket-taker, has been at the camp in a spin coaching capacity.

The group that ran the team for the last two years is going. Venugopal Rao was team director, Hemang Badani was head coach, Munaf Patel handled the bowlers, and Ian Bell came in as assistant before the 2026 season. None of the four is being retained.

Delhi finished sixth in IPL 2026 with seven wins from 14 under Axar Patel. That is not a disaster and it is nowhere near good enough for a squad built around KL Rahul, who made 593 runs. The bowling is where the case for change sits. Lungi Ngidi was Delhi’s leading wicket-taker with 13. Kagiso Rabada took 29 for Gujarat Titans and won the purple cap. A team whose best bowler finished 16 wickets behind the tournament leader has a bowling problem, and a bowling coach is the obvious thing to change first.

What Vaas actually brings

Vaas is 52, and the coaching CV is longer than the hiring headlines suggest. He has had several stints as Sri Lanka’s fast bowling coach over the past decade, and he has worked with Ireland and New Zealand. This year he was head coach of the Kandy Royals in the Lanka Premier League.

The playing record is the part Indian fans of a certain age will remember without needing to look it up. Vaas took 355 wickets in 111 Tests and 400 in 322 one-day internationals, across a career that ran from February 1994 to August 2008. He was in Sri Lanka’s 1996 World Cup-winning squad. And on 8 December 2001 at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo he took the first eight Zimbabwe wickets to fall and finished with 8 for 19, bowling them out for 38. Those are still the best figures in one-day international history, and still the only eight-wicket haul the format has produced.

None of that guarantees he can coach. Plenty of great bowlers have been ordinary coaches. But Vaas was never great in the way Indian crowds usually mean it. He bowled left-arm at a modest pace, moved it both ways, and took wickets for 14 years on surfaces built to make bowlers like him irrelevant. That is a useful set of skills to be able to explain to somebody else.

What it says about Delhi

There is a pattern to this hiring. Ganguly, Yuvraj, Amit Mishra, Vaas. Four men who were at their peak between roughly 1996 and 2013, brought in together, replacing a staff that was younger and less famous.

Franchises reach for this when the dressing room needs weight rather than tactics. Delhi have been in the IPL since the first season in 2008. They have reached one final, in 2020, and lost it to Mumbai Indians. No title, across a name change and a long line of coaching staffs. Whether four big reputations fix that is a separate question, and nobody can answer it until next April.

For now the only confirmed part is that Vaas has been in Delhi, watching bowlers, and the franchise has not said a word about it.

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