By Prakash Nair 
New Chandigarh, April 28: Nobody expected Punjab Kings to still be unbeaten at this stage of the season. Not after the way this franchise has historically found ways to lose matches it had no business losing. Not after years of near-misses and heartbreaks and that particular brand of Punjab suffering that IPL fans have quietly accepted as tradition. But here they are. Eight games in. Still standing. Still winning. And tonight at Mullanpur, they get another shot at Rajasthan Royals a side that arrived this season full of noise and promise, and has spent the last month going very, very quiet.
Match 40. A Monday night game that matters more than most.
Punjab Have Stopped Being Unlucky, They Have Started Being Good
Six wins and one washout from seven games. Thirteen points. Top of the table. A record-breaking chase of 265 in their last outing against Delhi Capitals. That last number is worth sitting with for a moment. Two hundred and sixty-five runs. Chased. Successfully. In a T20 match.
That is not luck. That is not a fluke. At a certain point, you have to look at a team and say, right, something is genuinely different here.
And something is. This Punjab side bats deep, bats fast, and somehow bats deeper and faster when things go wrong. Prabhsimran Singh’s strike rate actually goes up after his opening partner, Priyansh Arya, gets out. Think about that. Most batters take time to settle when a wicket falls. Prabhsimran gets more aggressive. His strike rate with Priyansh at the crease sits around 167. After Priyansh is dismissed, it jumps to 181. That is the kind of detail that keeps opposition coaches awake at three in the morning.
Then there is Shreyas Iyer, who has quietly had one of the best captaincy seasons any IPL skipper has put together in recent memory. His 71 not out off 36 balls to finish that chase against Delhi last week was not just a good innings. It was the kind of knock that changes how a dressing room sees itself. When your captain does something that should not be possible and makes it look ordinary, it does something to a team’s belief that no team meeting or pep talk ever could.
Rajasthan will know all of this. They have watched the highlights. And they are coming to Mullanpur anyway, which takes a certain kind of courage in itself.
Royals A Brilliant Top Order Carrying a Dead Middle
Here is Rajasthan’s season in one sentence. Yashasvi Jaiswal and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi bat. Everyone else tries to not mess it up. Sometimes they succeed. Lately, not so much.
Sooryavanshi is 14 years old and he hits the ball like someone who has not been told yet that what he is doing is supposed to be difficult. His 103 off 37 balls against Sunrisers Hyderabad in the previous game was the kind of innings that makes you put your cup of chai down and just watch. Jaiswal, at the other end, is the calm to his storm. Assured, correct, always finding gaps. Together they are arguably the most exciting opening pair in this year’s tournament.
The trouble starts at No. 4 and does not stop until No. 8.
Rajasthan’s middle order has managed just one half-century between them all season. Their combined average sits at 20.6. Their strike rate, 126, is the kind of number that is acceptable for a No. 7 nudging ones and twos in a Test match, not for batters who are supposed to be accelerating a T20 innings. Shimron Hetmyer, a player capable of destroying any bowling attack on his day, has scored 72 runs in six innings at a strike rate of 116. That is not Hetmyer. That is a man who has misplaced himself somewhere and is still looking.
The brutal reality is this. When Jaiswal and Sooryavanshi are going, Rajasthan look like title contenders. The moment one of them falls, they look like a side without a plan. That is a dangerous way to approach the business end of an IPL season.
Jofra Archer Is Still the Most Dangerous Man in the Room
For all of Rajasthan’s batting struggles, their bowling attack still has something that most sides in this tournament simply do not. A genuinely world-class fast bowler at the top of his game.
Jofra Archer has been relentless this season. Right-hand batters have managed only 6.7 runs per over against him in IPL 2026. In a competition where 10 an over in the powerplay is routine, 6.7 is almost medieval. He hits the pitch hard, gets it to move, bowls the bouncer you expect and the yorker you do not. He is the kind of bowler who can make a 200-plus target feel irrelevant if he picks up two wickets in his first three overs.
That is Rajasthan’s actual path to winning tonight. Archer and Nandre Burger need to take the powerplay away from Punjab. If Priyansh and Prabhsimran get out cheaply, suddenly Punjab are asking questions of a middle order that has not been tested under serious pressure this season. They have always had foundations to build on. What they look like without those foundations is genuinely unknown.
Rajasthan know this. It is probably the only conversation worth having in their team huddle before the toss.
Chahal Is Hiding Something and Left-Handers Have Noticed
Yuzvendra Chahal started this season looking like the Chahal of old. Sharp, varied, clever. He was taking wickets and making batters look silly and all was right in his world.
Something changed.
The analysts at ESPNcricinfo have spotted it and it is a fascinating problem. In the last two IPL seasons, Chahal bowled googlies to left-handed batters roughly 2 to 4 per cent of the time. This year, that number is 52 per cent. He is essentially bowling it every other delivery against left-handers. And left-handers have read it. They are waiting for it. He is going for 11.3 runs per over when he serves it up.
For a spinner whose entire threat is built on not showing the batter what is coming next, this is a serious issue. If Jaiswal picks up on the pattern early tonight and Jaiswal is sharp enough to do exactly that Chahal’s evening could unravel quickly.
Riyan Parag against Chahal is the other subplot worth watching. Parag has faced him four times in the IPL and never been dismissed, though he has only scored 11 runs against him. So Chahal contains him, but does not get him out. In a match where every run matters, that dynamic could become important in the 15th over when Rajasthan need someone to go after the bowling.
On the other side, Arshdeep Singh against Jaiswal is a battle this rivalry deserves. Jaiswal has done reasonably well against Arshdeep historically, 58 runs from 35 deliveries across their seven career meetings. But Arshdeep’s left-arm angle is awkward for any opener, and on a ground where the powerplay can set the entire tone of the match, a single delivery could change everything.
That Toss Is Going to Be Interesting
Mullanpur at night has dew. Dew makes spinners miserable and chasers slightly happier in theory. But the numbers at this particular ground suggest the theory does not always hold.
The team batting first has won two of the last three games here, posting 205 and 228 in those wins. The venue average in the first innings is 191. So, batting first and setting a big score is not the conservative choice, it is arguably the smarter one. Even for a team as comfortable chasing as Punjab.
Both captains will know this. The toss winner will likely bat and will likely bat aggressively from the first ball. Expect fireworks regardless of who wins it.
Thirty Games. Rajasthan Lead 17-13. That Matters Somewhere
On paper, tonight looks like a Punjab win and almost everyone who has looked at the numbers has come to roughly the same conclusion. Pre-match win probability has Punjab at around 55 per cent, Rajasthan at 45. Sensible. Honest.
But across 30 IPL meetings between these two sides, Rajasthan have actually won more. Seventeen to thirteen. And at Mullanpur specifically, Rajasthan has won both their previous visits this season. There is something about this ground that suits them, even when everything else says it should not.
That historical detail will not win Rajasthan the match tonight. Their middle order still needs to bat. Hetmyer still needs to find himself again. But it gives them something to hold onto when the dressing room gets quiet before the team walks out.
Some matches you win on numbers. Some you win on nerve. Tonight has the ingredients for both.
The Simple Version of What Needs to Happen
For Punjab to win, they need their openers to survive the powerplay and they basically cruise from there. Their batting is deep enough, aggressive enough, and calm enough under pressure that a platform is all they need. If they chase, they will back themselves at any target under 220. If they bat first, they will back themselves to post 200-plus on a ground where they have done exactly that three times already.
For Rajasthan to win, Archer needs to be devastating in the first six overs, Jaiswal and Sooryavanshi need to fire together, and at least two batters from positions 4 to 8 need to remember what they are paid to do. That is three things needing to go right at once. It is possible. It is just not easy.
The gap between these teams in 2026 is real. Punjab is better right now. More settled. More dangerous. More used to winning.
Rajasthan needs one of those nights where none of that matters.
Whether tonight is that night gets decided in the next few hours.
IPL 2026 Points Table
| No | Team | M | W | L | NR | Pts | NRR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Punjab Kings (PBKS) | 7 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 13 | +1.333 |
| 2 | Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) | 7 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 10 | +1.101 |
| 3 | Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) | 8 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 10 | +0.815 |
| 4 | Rajasthan Royals (RR) | 8 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 10 | +0.602 |
| 5 | Gujarat Titans (GT) | 8 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 8 | −0.475 |
| 6 | Chennai Super Kings (CSK) | 8 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 6 | −0.121 |
| 7 | Delhi Capitals (DC) | 7 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 6 | −0.184 |
| 8 | Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) | 8 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 5 | −0.751 |
| 9 | Mumbai Indians (MI) | 7 | 2 | 5 | 0 | 4 | −0.736 |
| 10 | Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) | 8 | 2 | 6 | 0 | 4 | −1.106 |
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
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