By Prakash Nair 
Dharamsala, May 27: There are nights in cricket when you come in expecting a contest and leave having witnessed something else entirely. Something that belongs in a different category. Last night in Dharamsala was one of those nights, and the man responsible for it was wearing the RCB captaincy armband and batting like he had decided, somewhere around the 15th over, that the laws of the game no longer quite applied to him.
RCB beat GT by 92 runs in IPL 2026 Qualifier 1. They are going to the final. But the scoreline, as clean and commanding as it looks, tells you almost nothing about what actually happened at the HPCA Stadium last night.
Patidar, and Then Everything Else
Before anything else gets written about this match, the innings needs to be described properly. Because if you reduce it to a scorecard entry, you do it a disservice.
Rajat Patidar scored an unbeaten 93 off 33 balls. It is the quickest innings of 90 or more in IPL history. RCB finished on 254 for 5, the highest total ever posted in an IPL playoff match. Against Kagiso Rabada. Against Rashid Khan. In a knockout fixture. On a surface that was supposed to keep things honest.
Those three sentences need a moment to land.
The match had been evenly poised heading into the final stretch. At the end of the 14th over, RCB were 140 for 3. And then something broke open. Beginning with no-balls from Khejroliya in the 15th, the floodgates opened. RCB scored 114 runs in the last six overs.
One hundred and fourteen. In six overs. In a playoff game.
Virat Kohli made 43. Krunal Pandya contributed 43. And at the end, Patidar and Jitesh Sharma smashed 40 off the final 12 balls together, though by that point Patidar had already made the match his own in a way that partnerships rarely capture.
Two of his nine sixes became instant highlights. First, an extra-cover drive off Rashid from the crease that barely seemed possible given where the ball pitched. Then, a back-foot drive over cover off Rabada that left Kohli visibly awestruck at the non-striker’s end.
When Virat Kohli stops and stares, you know something genuinely unusual has just happened. He has seen everything this game has to offer for over two decades. He was not pretending.
GT tried a slow bouncer at some point, presumably to disrupt Patidar’s rhythm. He steered it over short fine with a delayed hook. He did not quite get enough strike to reach a hundred, but that felt almost beside the point. A century would have been a nicer number. What he actually produced was more significant than a number.
In the time Patidar hit his 93, the other end of the pitch produced just 68 runs from 37 legal deliveries. The innings was not built on a platform. It was not the product of ideal conditions or a team effort with the bat. It was one captain, on the biggest night of his season, deciding that the bowling attack everyone had been treating with reverence all tournament was going to be dismantled.
He was right.
Phil Salt Was Not There. Nobody Noticed.
RCB were missing the injured Phil Salt, which allowed them to bring in Jacob Duffy as their fourth overseas player. Before the match, Salt’s absence had been the biggest talking point. GT had presumably built their plans around the opening combination they knew. What they encountered instead was an RCB lineup that did not look like it missed anyone.
That is the mark of a genuinely balanced squad. When the player whose return you spent a week discussing does not play and you post the highest score in playoff history, you are in good shape.
The Chase That Was Not Really a Chase
GT needed 255. On a Dharamsala surface, with short boundaries and dew expected to arrive later in the evening, the target was steep but not impossible. Not for a team with Gill, Sudharsan and Buttler at the top.
Only Gill, Sudharsan and Buttler did not quite make it to the crease in any meaningful sense.
Duffy had Sudharsan out hit-wicket for 14 off 9 balls. Then Bhuvneshwar Kumar removed Gill for just 2 off 7, leaving GT at 27 for 2 with their two most reliable match-winners already walking back.
Buttler came in with nowhere near enough platform and tried to take the game on anyway. He made 29 off 11. Then Hazlewood produced a knuckle-ball legcutter and clean bowled him. GT were 51 for 5 at the end of the powerplay.
Fifty-one for five. Chasing 255. At that point it was not a cricket match anymore. It was a formality dressed in cricket clothing.
Rasikh Salam dismissed both Nishant Sindhu and Jason Holder in three balls, and suddenly the man who had taken five dismissals against RCB in Ahmedabad three weeks ago was back in the dressing room for a duck. Cricket has a long memory, and occasionally it settles accounts quickly.
The One Man Who Refused to Let It Become a Rout
Rahul Tewatia came in as Impact Player and produced the kind of innings that defines his IPL career. Alone in a collapsing chase, he fought with genuine defiance and brought up a half-century against the RCB spinners almost entirely by himself.
He finished with 68 off 43 balls, eight fours, four sixes. His resistance was the only thing that prevented this from becoming the largest defeat in IPL playoff history. At one point a hundred looked genuinely possible, which would have been the strangest consolation prize in recent memory.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar ended the resistance, having Tewatia caught at extra cover for 68. Then Krunal finished things off, and Tim David ran in from long-off to take the final catch — a diving, full-length effort that sealed everything cleanly.
GT were bundled out for 162. RCB won by 92 runs. The Dharamsala sky had fireworks in it shortly after.
Bhuvneshwar Comes Back for the Purple Cap
With the wicket of Tewatia, Bhuvneshwar Kumar reclaimed the Purple Cap, drawing level with Rabada on 26 wickets but holding the better economy rate across the season.
It is quietly the most satisfying individual subplot of this RCB campaign. A veteran seamer, written off by most before the season began, leads the wicket charts heading into the final. He does not blow anyone away with raw pace. He simply keeps finding ways to take wickets when the game demands it. Last night in the powerplay, on the surface he had clearly been relishing all evening, he found the outside edges of the very batters GT’s entire season had been built around.
Duffy took three wickets. Krunal finished with 2 for 16. But Bhuvneshwar set the tone in those first four overs, and once the tone was set, the match never changed its complexion.
Gill After the Game
Shubman Gill was honest in the post-match press interaction. Fielding had not been up to the mark, he said. Catching and ground fielding under pressure had let them down. He called it one of those nights they would want to forget and start fresh from. He also acknowledged the chasing opportunity that slipped: “On a ground like this the ball travels, the outfield is quick. It could have been chaseable had we got a good start.”
He is right. Forty or fifty off the first six overs, with Gill and Sudharsan in full flow, and 255 stops feeling like a mountain. They never got close to that start, and once Hazlewood bowled Buttler with that legcutter in over five, the chase was finished as a competitive exercise.
GT still have Qualifier 2. They are too good a side to be written off. But they will need to rediscover the Gill and Sudharsan who carried them through the league stage, and quickly, because whoever emerges from the Eliminator between SRH and RR will arrive with momentum of their own.
What This Means
RCB go to the IPL 2026 Final in Ahmedabad on May 31. The last eight IPL editions have been won by the team that won Qualifier 1. That statistic has a weight to it that no amount of caveating can fully dismiss.
They are defending champions. They finished first in the league stage. Their captain just produced the fastest 90-plus innings in the history of this tournament in a knockout match. Their lead bowler just reclaimed the Purple Cap. And they do all of this without Phil Salt, who presumably returns for the final.
The final is in five days. RCB will rest. RCB will prepare. And somewhere in Ahmedabad, whoever makes it through Qualifier 2 will be watching last night’s footage and trying to find something in Patidar’s technique that gives them a way through.
Good luck with that.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
