Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Brief Scores: Royal Challengers Bengaluru (161/5) beat Gujarat (155/8) by five wickets to secure their second IPL title in Ahmedabad.
IPL 2026 FINAL: HIGHLIGHTS | SCORECARD
Eighteen years of hurt, heartbreak, and howling at the moon. And then, boom. Two titles in 12 months like they had been doing this all their lives.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru have officially gatecrashed the most exclusive club in Indian cricket. Only Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians had done the back-to-back before them. The old money. The establishment. The untouchables. Well, move over, gentlemen. There is new royalty in town, and they are wearing red.
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And they did not just win. They steamrolled. They pulverised. They made it look, frankly, embarrassing. Gujarat Titans arrived in the final hoping for a coronation of their own. What they got instead was a tutorial, a brutal, unforgiving masterclass in how a team operating like a Swiss watch, fuelled by rocket fuel, conducts its business.
If the 2025 and 2026 campaigns are anything to go by, Royal Challengers Bengaluru are not a flash in the pan. They are not a Cinderella story. They are the story. Full stop. Lock it in. They are here to stay, here to dominate, and they would very much like you to take note.
18 points to bulldoze their way to the top of the group stage table. A savage 92-run hammering of Gujarat Titans in Qualifier 1 to book a direct ticket from the mountains of Dharamsala to the heat of Ahmedabad. And then? A walk in the park in the final. An absolute, utterly serene, almost offensively relaxed stroll in front of 1,10,000 fans at the Narendra Modi Stadium.
Rajat Patidar and his band of marauders had said they wanted to be called attacking champions. Earned. Stamped. Certified. It felt as though the 12-month intermission, which had seen retirements, reshuffles, and more MS Dhoni farewell rumours than anyone can count, had changed precisely nothing for RCB. They picked up right where they left off, as though someone had simply pressed the resume button.
RCB’s PARTY FROM START TO FINISH
The final at Narendra Modi Stadium was technically Gujarat Titans’ home ground. In theory. On paper.
In reality? It was an RCB house party, and Gujarat were the uninvited guests who showed up late and immediately regretted it.
From the evening before the game, hundreds of red shirts descended on Ahmedabad, a city that sits proudly along the banks of the Sabarmati, where ancient ghats meet modern ambitions and the air hums with history, chanting RCB, RCB outside the venue like an army laying siege to a castle. By Sunday, more than 80 per cent of that packed crowd was draped in crimson. A hostile takeover.
RCB had the luxury of arriving early, setting up camp, training twice, sweating it out in the blistering 40-degree Celsius heat, and soaking in the vibes of the city before a single ball was bowled. They knew the ground. They knew the pitch. They knew exactly what was coming.
And then they put on the show their fans had crossed the country to witness.
A RUTHLESS BOWLING SHOW
After winning the toss, RCB bowled first. The pitch, baked, sluggish, roughed up by the merciless Ahmedabad sun, was not a track that promised fireworks. Tough, yes. Unplayable, no. But against a bowling attack this precise, this relentless, this suffocatingly well-drilled? Tough was more than enough.
Slow pitch? No problem. Rasikh Salam Dar, the fifth bowler, the one opponents might have underestimated for a half-second, walked in and took three wickets.
Both Gujarat openers are 700-run monsters this season? Fascinating. RCB dismissed them both in the powerplay, for the third time this season. Third. Time. It was not a fluke the first time. It was not a coincidence the second. By the third, it was just inevitable, like the sunrise, like taxes, like another Virat Kohli innings. Well, more about the latest Virat masterclass (an unbeaten 42-ball 75) as you scroll down.
Gill will not have the guts to look in the mirror after throwing it away having just hit a majestic six. Josh Hazlewood joining the party in a big final, as he always does. Then came Bhuvneshwar Kumar, the wily old dog, who finished the season with xx wickets, ensuring there was no Sai Sudharsan marathon. Seeing Sai standing outside the crease to negate the early swing, Bhuvneshwar bent his back and bowled a bouncer. Sai was the first of many to fall to the bouncer trap, executed like clockwork by the RCB bowlers.
26 for 2 in 3.4 overs. Both Gill and Sai gone. RCB had done half their job within 20 deliveries of the final.
Gujarat’s middle order? Well, that was Gujarat’s problem to solve. RCB merely kept the vice tightening, the pressure relentless, so suffocating that even Jos Buttler, a man who has counter-attacked his way out of more impossible situations than most teams encounter in a lifetime, did not fancy it. Did not even dare.
Gujarat Titans were held to 155 on a slow pitch, with the crowd mostly rooting against them, under a sky that felt like a furnace. It could have been worse, had Washington Sundar not been handed a reprieve when he was batting on 3 and substitute fielder Jordan Cox grassed his catch. It could have been worse had Arshad Khan, an uncapped all-rounder, not shown that there was room to counter-attack if you were brave enough, with a six-ball 15.
But 155 was all they could manage.
VIRAT KOHLI MASTERCLASS IN THE CHASE
The chase, though. Oh, the chase.
Rajat Patidar had said on the eve of the final that RCB were not thinking about defending the title. For them, Sunday was a blank canvas. Turn up. Get going. Start from scratch.
They turned up alright.
Venkatesh Iyer, playing the pinch-hitter role in Phil Salt’s absence, running on a leg that clearly had a niggle he was absolutely not letting slow him down, and Virat Kohli, a man who at this stage of his career is apparently experimenting with slogging fast bowlers with cross-batted shots just for the fun of it, tore into the Gujarat attack in the powerplay like two men who had been told dessert was only available to the first team past 60.
They got past 60 in the fifth over. They had 70 on the board by the end of the powerplay despite losing two wickets. Seventy runs in six overs with two men back in the hut, the effervescent Venkatesh Iyer after a stirring cameo, and a rare Devdutt Padikkal failure that the crowd will have already forgotten given what unfolded around it.
And then there was the Kagiso Rabada over. Beautiful, horrible, merciless.
South Africa’s finest. The leading wicket-taker of the season. Bowl short, pull shot, four. Bowl the good length, wrists engaged, ball dispatched. Three boundaries and a six. 19 runs off the over. The game seized by its collar, shaken vigorously, and flung in one direction only. RCB’s.
Game held by the scruff of its neck? That is one way to put it. The other way is: Gujarat never had a prayer.
There was a blip in the ninth over. It turned out to be only a blip. Rashid Khan, one of the finest T20 spinners in the world, gave the Gujarat Titans faithful the only brief period in which they said a prayer, hoped that a prayer or two might actually work, because nothing was going their way. He picked up Rajat Patidar, flighting it bravely and inviting the spin destroyer to go for the big one. Rajat went for a slog sweep but was caught at deep midwicket by Rabada.
Rashid struck again in the same over, removing Krunal Pandya, who had been their crisis man all season, for 1. A sweep gone wrong. A rare failure for another man who, like Devdutt, would be forgiven everything given what he had done through the campaign.
Crisis man gone. But there was Virat Kohli, and he ensured the pressure never got to them. With Tim David for company, the two batters never allowed the Gujarat Titans bowlers to find a way back. Kohli reached his fifty off 25 balls, his first half-century in a play-offs match since the 2016 final. A 41-run partnership that took them close to the finish line.
Tim David went. RCB were five down with 20-odd needed. But without the pressure of the scoreboard bearing down, it was always going to be a breeze.
Kohli unbeaten on 75, having battled cramps. A clockwork effort in the final. It did not carry the electricity of that 82 at the MCG against Pakistan. But Kohli was there until the end, seeing the job through in a chase that was delivered on a platter, thanks to the fine effort of his bowlers.
The most tense RCB fans felt was when Virat Kohli was nearly caught by Shubman Gill in the 16th over. Gill dived forward to take the catch, but it was deeemd not out.
Kohli punched the air in delight. RCB fans rejoiced. Only 11 runs were needed. Fittingly, Virat was able to be there, hitting the winning runs in style, with a six.
Only one team turned up on Sunday in Ahmedabad, in front of one of the biggest crowds an IPL final has ever seen.
It was not the team that had checked into the city late on Saturday evening, stumbling off buses under the moon, barely 24 hours before the biggest match of their season. Gujarat Titans were there in body. They were absent in everything else.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru, meanwhile, were there in body, soul, voice, plan, execution, belief, and sheer, unapologetic dominance.
Two titles. Back to back. 18 years to win the first, 12 months to win the second. A new empire, in red, is being built. This time, not on social media, but with silverware in the trophy cabinet.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
