By Prakash Nair 
Ahmedabad, June 1: Royal Challengers Bengaluru won the IPL 2026 final the way teams win when they’ve stopped being nervous about winning. No last-ball drama. No middle-order panic that nearly threw it all away. They beat Gujarat Titans by five wickets at the Narendra Modi Stadium and Virat Kohli hit the winning six, walked off unbeaten, and looked like he’d done exactly what he’d planned to do from the moment he woke up that morning.
Kohli finished on 75 not out off 42 balls, nine fours, three sixes, and RCB were done with two full overs still sitting unused.
Back-to-back IPL titles. Only the third franchise in the history of this tournament to defend the crown, after Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians. For a team that spent the better part of eighteen years being the league’s most loveable runners-up, that is a sentence worth reading twice.
The Evening Began With Bowling
People tend to forget, when Kohli bats like that, that the match was already half-won before he faced a delivery.
Patidar won the toss and bowled. Sensible read of the surface. The kind of call that looks obvious in hindsight and takes real conviction to make in a final, because if it goes wrong, you spend the rest of the evening explaining yourself.
It did not go wrong.
Shubman Gill was gone for 10, Hazlewood getting him. Sai Sudharsan went for 12, Bhuvneshwar dismissing him. Gujarat’s entire batting plan rested on those two finding their footing early and running from there. They found nothing. By the time the powerplay was done, the Titans were already playing catch-up cricket on a pitch that wasn’t going to help them do it.
Then Krunal Pandya came on and simply refused to be hit. His first three overs produced not a single boundary. Rasikh Salam was doing the same from the other end, just bowling good lengths, letting the surface do the work, not trying to be clever. There’s a kind of bowling that doesn’t look impressive on television but absolutely suffocates a batting side. That was what RCB did through the middle overs, methodically, without fuss.
Sindhu went for 20, caught at long-on. Buttler scratched around for 23 balls, made 19, and was stumped off Krunal when he finally tried to break free. It was that kind of innings. Frustrating to bat, satisfying to field, and slowly, inexorably turning the match into RCB’s.
Washington Sundar did what he could. He really did. Fifty not out off 37 balls, composed and unhurried while wickets kept toppling around him. In a different game, with a functioning top order behind him, that innings builds toward something dangerous. On Sunday it just kept Gujarat in the match long enough to make a contest of it.
Rasikh finished with three for 27. Bhuvneshwar and Hazlewood took two each. In the very last over, Rashid Khan hit Rasikh for a six off the first ball and was dismissed off the second. Gujarat ended on 155 for eight. On paper, a chaseable total. In practice, against this RCB bowling attack, it was never really going to be enough.
The Kid Who Wasn’t Even Playing
One of the quietly lovely details of the night came before the first ball of the chase was bowled. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was in the stands. Fifteen years old, Rajasthan Royals knocked out weeks ago, and he was sitting in Ahmedabad watching a final his team didn’t reach, because that’s where you go when you’ve had the season he’s had.
Both Gill and Sudharsan, the only two men who could have taken the Orange Cap from him, fell cheaply inside the powerplay. The cap was his the moment Sudharsan’s wicket went down. Seven hundred and seventy-six runs across 16 innings, averaging 48.50, strike rate of 237. He also picked up the MVP award and the Emerging Player of the season.
There will be years and years to write about Sooryavanshi. For now, just picture him in those stands, watching a final his side didn’t play in, collecting individual honours anyway. At fifteen. The league does that to you sometimes, just casually produces something you weren’t expecting.
Then Kohli Opened His Shoulders
The chase started at a sprint. Kohli and Venkatesh Iyer put on the fastest fifty partnership in IPL final history, getting there in 3.3 overs. Iyer went after Rabada from ball one, the kind of aggressive intent that forces a bowler to rethink his lengths. Rabada went for 37 runs in his first two overs alone. For a man who came into the game as the tournament’s frontrunner for the Purple Cap, it was a chastening way to begin the night.
Then, as these things go, it tightened.
Siraj got Iyer. Rabada got Padikkal. RCB were 70 for two at the end of the powerplay. Still fine, technically. Still well ahead of where they needed to be. But T20 cricket has a way of compressing very quickly, and when Rashid Khan removed both Patidar and Krunal Pandya in the same over, reducing RCB to 91 for four in the ninth, the match had suddenly acquired a genuine edge.
Kohli didn’t seem to notice.
His fifty came off 25 balls. The fastest half-century of his entire IPL career. He wasn’t slugging. He wasn’t being reckless. He was just impossibly decisive, reading the length early, hitting the gaps, rotating when he needed to, accelerating when he could. There’s a version of this innings that becomes difficult viewing if three or four more wickets fall quickly. It never got close to that version.
Tim David made 24 off 17 balls and put on 41 for the fifth wicket with Kohli before edging one to Buttler. That brought Jitesh Sharma out. And still Kohli was there, untroubled, doing what he needed to do.
RCB crossed the line with five wickets in hand and 12 balls to spare. Kohli hit the last boundary for six. Of course he did.
A Number That Deserves Its Own Paragraph
Kohli ended the season with 675 runs, becoming the first batter in IPL history to score 600 or more runs in four consecutive editions.
He is 37 years old. He has played for one franchise since 2008. Not one season away, not one transfer, not one fresh start somewhere else. Just RCB, every single year, through the runner-up finishes and the early exits and all the noise about whether he was past his best, whether the team was too dependent on him, whether they’d ever actually win anything.
And now they’ve won it twice in a row. And he’s still the best batter in the tournament.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar also made history, equalling the record for the most powerplay wickets by an Indian bowler in a single IPL season, finishing 2026 with 17 powerplay wickets to his name. He’s not young either. He’s rebuilt his career more times than most bowlers get to, and this was, by most measures, one of the finest bowling seasons he’s ever produced. On a night of big stories, that one risks getting lost. It shouldn’t.
Kohli at the Mic
He didn’t go for grand declarations afterwards. He was relaxed. Perhaps that’s what two titles does to you.
“I said to a few of the other boys that it doesn’t feel like the same pressure as last year. We knew what kind of ability we have in the group. We topped the table. There’s a reason we got here first. We just said one thing: if we stick to our cricket, if we execute our plans, we are the best team in the competition.”
On what back-to-back titles feel like:
“Every IPL trophy is special. It’s like having kids, you can’t pick one. It’s similar with IPL trophies because everything is so hard-earned. I’m grateful that in 11 years, to have five trophies, it’s been special for me.”
And then there was the bit that perhaps matters most, the thing that separates this RCB from the ones that came before:
“You feel like you’re stepping onto the ground and you don’t need to be the one to step up every time. There’s guys behind you, around you, who can win games of cricket for you. We have so many Man of the Match awards spread throughout the group.”
That’s not what RCB used to sound like. For most of their history, they were a team where Kohli carried the weight and everyone else tried to help. This side is genuinely different. The bowling depth, the middle-order composure, the bowling in the powerplay that can dismantle an opposition top order without needing anyone to do anything exceptional. It’s a team. An actual, functioning team.
Gujarat’s Unanswered Questions
Gujarat Titans have now lost two finals in the last four seasons. They came into existence, won the title in their debut year, built genuine belief across the league, and have since discovered that finals are a different kind of cricket altogether. Their batting on Sunday simply wasn’t competitive. Both openers were back in the dugout before the sixth over was done. Buttler never found the gear he needed. Sundar tried heroically and ran out of partners.
There are questions here about batting depth, about whether their auction strategy has left them too reliant on specific conditions, about whether Gill’s captaincy in knockout cricket is finding its full expression. These are questions they’ll sit with through the off-season. Sunday night gave no easy answers.
What It All Adds Up To
RCB have now won two IPL titles, and four major franchise trophies in total when the two Women’s Premier League titles are included. The women’s side has been building their own legacy quietly and well. The franchise, top to bottom, has changed.
For the fans who were there in 2009, who were there in 2011, who were there in 2016 for all three of those runner-up heartbreaks: this isn’t a fluke. That’s the thing. You can argue a first title is fortune meeting preparation at exactly the right moment. A second one, back to back, is something else entirely.
It’s a dynasty starting to take shape.
Kohli hit it over long-on, turned to the crowd, made some gesture nobody’s quite decoded yet, and walked off. The match was done. The title was theirs. And somewhere in the stands, a fifteen-year-old with the Orange Cap was probably wondering what his own final night will look like someday.
That’s the IPL at its best. Two stories, happening at once, on the same ground, and both of them meaning something.
Stay ahead with Hindustan Herald — bringing you trusted news, sharp analysis, and stories that matter across Politics, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, and more.
Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, and join our Telegram community @hindustanherald for real-time updates.
Sports reporter covering cricket, football, and Olympic disciplines, with on-ground event experience.
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
