By Prakash Nair 
New Chandigarh, March 31: Six runs. That is all. Six runs separated PBKS from the one thing this franchise has chased for over two decades. When Royal Challengers Bengaluru lifted the IPL 2025 trophy in Ahmedabad, the Kings stood in the outfield looking like men who had just watched something slip through their fingers in slow motion. You do not forget a loss like that quickly. You probably do not forget it at all.
Tonight at the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium in Mullanpur, Punjab Kings open their IPL 2026 campaign against Gujarat Titans, and everything about this fixture carries the residue of last season. The hunger is real. The crowd will be real. Whether Punjab can finally translate that emotional electricity into the one result that matters at the end of May that is the question that will follow this team for the next two months.
Toss at 7:00 PM. First ball at 7:30.
Iyer Keeps Showing Up. India Keeps Looking Away.
Start with Shreyas Iyer, because you have to. The man has now taken three different IPL franchises to the final. Three. Delhi Capitals in 2020. KKR in 2024 when they won the whole thing. PBKS last season when they came agonisingly close. No other captain in the history of this tournament has done that.
And yet. He has not pulled on an India T20I jersey since December 2023.
Last season Iyer scored 604 runs at a strike rate of over 175. That was the highest return among the top-10 run-getters. He led from the front, absorbed pressure, made the big calls, and still the selectors found a way to look right through him during the Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup cycle. It is one of those peculiar Indian cricket stories that has no satisfying explanation. The numbers are there. The wins are there. The scrutiny, apparently, never ends.
Ponting, for his part, came to the pre-match press conference in Mullanpur on Monday with the tone of a man who is done with modest expectations. “We’ve got the players that we want in certain roles, but we’ve also got a back-up player for most of those players right the way down to our 25th player,” he said. “I just think overall, we should be stronger.” That is Ricky Ponting, which means the confidence is not posturing. He has seen this squad up close for two seasons now. He knows what it can do.
Vice captain Shashank Singh was even blunter: “We didn’t cross that last hurdle in 2025 and everyone is coming this year more pumped up, more motivated.” Fine. But that kind of motivation needs somewhere to go. Tonight is where it starts being tested.
There is one uncomfortable number sitting in the corner of all this positivity, though. In five IPL games at this very ground, Iyer has scored 27 runs. Strike rate of 100. Highest score of 10. It is so out of character for him that it almost reads like a typo. Whether that changes tonight on his home ground, in his team’s season opener, in front of what will be a packed and expectant crowd is one of the genuine sub-plots of the evening.
Gill Has Nothing to Prove (He Says)
Across the fence, Shubman Gill is doing his best to project calm. “If you look at the past few seasons I have the most IPL runs,” he said recently, with a composure that his batting has not always matched in T20 internationals. “I don’t think I have anything to prove this season in particular.”
Which may well be true. Since 2023, only Virat Kohli has scored more IPL runs than Gill. The consistency is genuinely remarkable. Still, the conversation around his strike rate has not gone away. His career T20 strike rate sits around 138, and while he pushed it past 155 last season a real improvement the selectors left him out of India’s T20 World Cup squad anyway, opting for Sanju Samson instead. India went on to win a record third World Cup title. Gill was watching on television.
He is India’s Test and ODI captain now. Arguably the country’s most important batter in the longer formats. But in T20s, the question of whether Gill can consistently bat at the tempo the format demands is one that follows him into every IPL like a shadow he cannot quite shake.
Gujarat Titans under Gill have a clear identity. They do not reinvent themselves each season. They do not panic-buy at auction. They control the middle overs, they finish calmly, and they trust the process even when it looks boring from the outside. Coach Ashish Nehra made their intent explicit ahead of the season: GT are not here to participate. The Titans reached the playoffs last season before falling to Mumbai Indians in the Eliminator by 20 runs a game they had the firepower to win, a game where things just did not click at the crucial moment.
Their squad this time brings in Jason Holder and Luke Wood for overseas depth, while keeping the core of Sai Sudharsan, Rashid Khan, Jos Buttler, and the bowling trio of Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, and Kagiso Rabada largely intact. Batting coach Matthew Hayden has been working specifically on Gill’s powerplay intent. The results of those sessions could be visible as early as over one tonight.
Mullanpur at Night
The pitch at Mullanpur is the kind that makes fans happy and bowlers nervous at least early on. The surface has a mix of red and black soil, offering decent bounce in the powerplay that batters can capitalise on, before it gradually slows and starts to grip. Average first-innings score sits around 165-170, but this ground has seen 200-plus totals more than once.
The specific pitch being used tonight Pitch 4 was the same surface on which Punjab scored 219 against CSK last season, with Priyansh Arya hitting a century. CSK replied with 201. If Pitch 4 behaves anything like it did that evening, expect fireworks.
One caveat: weather. Forecasts have been slightly mixed across different outlets. Some predict mainly clear skies by evening with temperatures around 20 degrees and precipitation probability of just 1 percent. Others have flagged 95 percent cloud cover, a small chance of rain, and even an orange alert for hailstorms during the afternoon. The broad consensus is that the match itself should not be affected, but the clouds hanging over Mullanpur today feel like a minor metaphor for Punjab’s last 12 months mostly fine, but with the occasional storm you did not see coming.
The Three Battles That Settle This
Look, in a T20 match between teams this well-matched, the game usually comes down to two or three moments in specific overs. Here are the ones that matter tonight.
Arshdeep Singh vs Shubman Gill in the powerplay. Arshdeep swings the new ball back into right-handers. Gill times the ball beautifully early but has historically been susceptible to high-quality movement in the first three overs. If Arshdeep gets one to nip back through Gill’s defences in overs one or two, GT’s entire innings shifts. If Gill gets going, he has the ability to take the game away from Punjab before the field spreads.
Rashid Khan vs Shreyas Iyer in the middle overs. This is probably the defining matchup of the match, and both men know it well. Iyer reads spin better than most in the country he is comfortable against orthodox turn, plays the sweep and reverse-sweep confidently, and rarely looks panicked at the crease. Rashid, coming off a reportedly difficult T20 World Cup, will want to remind people of his best here. The googly battle in overs 10 through 15 could be something genuinely worth watching.
Kagiso Rabada vs Shashank Singh in the death. Rabada’s express pace and bouncer targeting against Shashank’s instinct for improvisation. Crucially, Rabada and Iyer shared a dressing room at Delhi Capitals. He knows Iyer’s weakness against short-pitched deliveries. Expect that knowledge to be deployed the moment Iyer gets going.
The Openers: Where Punjab’s Season Really Lives
Whatever happens with Iyer, there is something about the opening combination of Priyansh Arya and Prabhsimran Singh that feels like the heartbeat of this Punjab team. Last season those two scored 1,024 runs together at a combined strike rate approaching 169. In 15 of 17 matches, at least one of them crossed 40. Punjab won 11 of those games. The correlation is not accidental.
The structure Ponting has built this team around is the understanding that if your openers take the powerplay apart, everyone below them has the freedom to play their natural game. It works. When it does not work when Arya and Prabhsimran fall cheaply Punjab can look a different, more vulnerable team.
The new wrinkle this season is Cooper Connolly at No. 3. The young Australian comes in as a specialist batter, with Cricket Australia advising him to rest his bowling after a back injury. Bringing in a non-bowling overseas slot at No. 3 is a statement of faith in Connolly’s bat. Whether that faith is justified in match one of the season is another live question for tonight.
For GT, the Gill and Sai Sudharsan opening partnership is the gold standard in the current IPL. Last season they combined for 912 runs the third highest by an opening pair in a single IPL campaign. Sudharsan won the Orange Cap with 750 runs. Gill chipped in with 650. Against that kind of firepower, Punjab’s opening bowling of Arshdeep and Marco Jansen has to hit the ground running.
Reading the Bigger Picture
Step back even further and there is something genuinely compelling about what this match represents in 2026. Two men Iyer and Gill who are each, by any reasonable measure, among the finest T20 batters India has produced in recent years, and yet both have effectively been sidelined from the national T20 conversation. Iyer has not played a T20I since December 2023. Gill was left out of the World Cup squad. And both have responded the only way they can by showing up at the IPL and doing it all over again.
The selectors will be watching tonight. They are always watching. Whether what they see changes anything is a different matter entirely.
Still, this is not a game being played in boardrooms or selection committees. It is being played in Mullanpur, in front of a crowd that has waited a long time to see their team go one better than last May. Punjab Kings fans have watched this franchise flirt with greatness for over twenty years. They finished runners-up in 2014. They finished runners-up in 2025. The gap between those two heartbreaks is the entire professional careers of most of the current squad.
For now, there is tonight. A pitch that likes boundaries. Two captains with something to settle. And six runs that nobody in the Punjab dressing room has stopped thinking about since Ahmedabad.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
