By Prakash Nair 
Bengaluru, March 28: Nobody really expected the first game of IPL 2026 to be a thriller. Opening matches rarely are. You get a crowd that’s just happy to be there, a pitch that hasn’t quite woken up, and two teams still shaking off the rust of pre-season. But the Chinnaswamy on a Saturday night has never really cared about expectations. It does what it wants.
And what it wanted on Saturday was a party.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru chased down 202 like it was a Sunday afternoon knockabout. Six wickets. 15.4 overs. 26 balls to spare. Sunrisers Hyderabad never really stood a chance once the chase began, and if you’re an SRH fan reading this from Hyderabad right now, well, sorry. It was one of those nights.
Before the Cricket, a Moment
This needs to be said before anything else.
Last year, when RCB won their first-ever IPL title, the celebrations outside this very stadium turned into a tragedy. Eleven people were killed in a stampede. Eleven families were destroyed on what should have been the happiest night in this club’s history. Cricket coming back to the Chinnaswamy so soon after that carries a weight that you cannot really put into words. The fireworks went off before the match. The music played. The crowd was enormous and loud. But somewhere in all of that noise, there was a quietness too. A heaviness that people carried in without saying anything about it.
The players knew. The fans knew. Everyone knew.
Right. Now the cricket.
SRH’s Top Order Just Collapsed
Sunrisers Hyderabad won the toss, chose to bat, and within the first few overs looked like a team that had forgotten how to bat.
The man responsible for that chaos was someone most casual fans had probably never heard of before Saturday. Jacob Duffy. New Zealand. IPL debut. And he was absolutely brilliant.
He’s a seamer who hits a good, hard length and keeps it simple. Doesn’t do anything flashy. Just puts the ball in the right areas and makes batters uncomfortable. On Saturday, that approach claimed the wickets of Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, and Nitish Kumar Reddy in the powerplay. He bowled all four of his overs in one go and finished with 3 wickets for just 22 runs. On a ground where bowlers usually get absolutely hammered, those are remarkable figures.
SRH were wobbling at 29 for 3. On a ground like the Chinnaswamy, that kind of start usually means a total somewhere around 160. Nobody gives you 200 from there without something extraordinary happening.
Something extraordinary happened.
Ishan Kishan Decided He Wasn’t Going Down Without a Fight
Ishan Kishan is a complicated figure in Indian cricket. Brilliant one season, out of favour the next. Dropped, recalled, dropped again. He’s had the kind of career that would break most people. But he walked out to bat on Saturday as captain, in the absence of the injured Pat Cummins, and played one of the best knocks you’ll see in an IPL opener.
Thirteen boundaries off 38 balls. Pure Kishan. Not slogging, not getting lucky, just reading the bowling and hitting it hard in the right places. He found a brilliant partner in Aniket Verma, a young lad who seems to have absolutely zero fear of anyone. Verma faced 18 balls and hit seven of them to the boundary. Seven. From 18 balls. That is ridiculous.
Between the two of them, they dragged SRH from disaster to a total of 201 for 9. That is genuinely impressive batting against a good bowling attack.
The problem was Kishan getting out right when SRH needed him most. Phil Salt took a stunning one-handed catch at the boundary to end Kishan’s innings, and from that point on, SRH’s hope of posting something truly threatening effectively ended. Verma kept swinging and hit a couple more big ones before holing out. The innings finished, and everyone started wondering: is 201 enough?
It was not.
Devdutt Padikkal Turned This Into a Romp
Before Kohli even got going, Devdutt Padikkal had already half-won the game.
This is a player who has always had talent but has sometimes looked like he needed a place he felt comfortable in to fully express it. Bengaluru seems to be that place. From ball one he was at it. He backed away to his first ball from David Payne and launched it over cover-point for six. The crowd lost their minds a little. By the time he reached 28, he’d done it off just ten balls. When he was finally dismissed for 61 off 26 balls, RCB still needed about 90 runs, but the game had already been tilted so far in their favour that it didn’t really matter.
SRH’s bowlers had no answer for him. You could see it in the field placements, which kept changing. You could see it in the expressions of the fielders, which kept saying: what do we do with this man.
Nobody figured it out.
Then There’s Kohli. There’s Always Kohli.
Right, what is there left to say about Virat Kohli that hasn’t already been said a hundred times?
He is 37 years old. He plays in a format designed for younger, more explosive batters. He doesn’t hit the ball as hard as Tim David or as far as some of his younger teammates. And yet somehow, consistently, against every bowling attack, on every ground in this country, he ends up being the one who finishes the job.
Saturday was no different. He came in, steadied things when Padikkal was going berserk at the other end, and then just quietly took the game apart. He ended on 69 not out off 38 balls and was named Player of the Match. He also became the first batter in IPL history to go past 4,000 runs specifically in run chases. His 64th IPL fifty, by the way, in case you were keeping count.
The finish was pure drama. Harshal Patel, his old teammate, is bowling the final over. Kohli needed about 18 off it. He hit a six first ball. Then a four. Then a four. Then another four. Done. Arms in the air, blows a kiss to his wife, Anushka, in the stands, big smile, teammates pouring out of the dugout.
Classic Kohli. Genuinely gets a bit tiresome how good he is, honestly.
Where Does This Leave Both Teams
RCB look frightening. A debutant bowler who can actually take wickets. Padikkal is giving them a genuine match-winner at number three. Kohli is doing what Kohli does. And this was without Josh Hazlewood, who wasn’t available for this game due to fitness reasons. When Hazlewood comes back, this bowling attack gets significantly better. Other teams have been warned.
SRH have a lot of thinking to do. Kishan was excellent and deserved better from those around him. Aniket Verma is a real player and will cause problems this season. But that bowling attack, without Cummins, looked genuinely ordinary. Harshal Patel alone gave away 39 runs in less than three overs, and at no point during the chase did SRH look like they were going to actually defend 201. They need Cummins back, and they need him quickly.
The Bigger Picture
IPL 2026 is now underway. Nineteen seasons in. The tournament that everybody said would burn itself out in five years is still the loudest, most watched, most maddeningly addictive cricket competition on the planet. Saturday night reminded you why.
A packed Chinnaswamy. A team honouring a painful past by playing with joy. A legendary batter still doing things that make you stop and stare. A New Zealand debutant running in and making Travis Head look uncomfortable. A young finisher from Hyderabad hitting sixes like he’s playing tape-ball cricket in a lane somewhere.
This is why people watch. Not always for the tactics or the records or the points table implications. Sometimes just for the feeling of it.
RCB have that feeling right now. The rest of the tournament is going to be interesting.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
