AHMEDABAD – Virat Kohli waited eighteen years for one of these nights, and now he has had two in a row.
The 37-year-old stood at the crease at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Sunday with his bat raised and his eyes wet, unbeaten on 75, as Royal Challengers Bengaluru beat Gujarat Titans by five wickets to win a second straight Indian Premier League title. The chase of 156 was meant to be the simpler half of the evening, on a ground that was handed the final only weeks earlier. Kohli made certain it was, even as the innings frayed around him.
He got there in a hurry. By the time he reached fifty, off just 25 balls and the quickest of his long IPL life, RCB were most of the way home and a stadium dressed in Gujarat colors had gone quiet. Nine fours and three sixes later he was still standing, steering Jitesh Sharma through the closing overs, the defending champions home with two overs to spare. The unbeaten 75 carried him to 675 runs for the campaign, fourth on the season’s run charts.
What set the innings apart was not its speed but its stubbornness. RCB raced to 62 inside the powerplay before Venkatesh Iyer fell for a punchy 32, caught at mid-on off Mohammed Siraj. Then came the wobble. Devdutt Padikkal edged Kagiso Rabada to the deep for one, captain Rajat Patidar went for 15, and Krunal Pandya for one, three wickets in a cluster that briefly turned a procession into a contest. Rashid Khan, who finished with two for 25, threatened to drag Gujarat back in. Four down and the asking rate ticking up, Kohli simply declined to be the fifth, adding 41 with Tim David and letting the target come to him.
The match had really been decided an hour earlier, when RCB’s bowlers choked Gujarat to a total that never looked like enough. Patidar won the toss and bowled, and the call looked shrewd almost at once. Rasikh Salam Dar, the Jammu and Kashmir seamer whose career had stalled a few seasons ago, returned three for 27 and accounted for Nishant Sindhu, Rahul Tewatia and Rashid Khan across the innings. Bhuvneshwar Kumar took two for 29 and never gave the Titans room, a fitting close to a season that brought him 28 wickets, one short of the Purple Cap that went to Gujarat’s Kagiso Rabada. The trophy mattered more, the veteran said afterward, because every player had had the other’s back.
Shubman Gill fell for 10, caught off Josh Hazlewood, who finished with two for 37. Sai Sudharsan made 12. Jos Buttler nudged his way to 19 before Krunal stumped him, and the Titans kept losing wickets at the very moment they looked ready to build, their biggest stand of the night worth a meager 29. Washington Sundar held one end with an unbeaten fifty off 37, and a late cameo of 15 from six balls by Mohd Arshad Khan gave the innings a pulse, but 155 for 8 on a good surface was a score to survive on, not to win with.
For Gujarat this was a third final in five seasons and a second runners-up finish, a record that points to rare consistency and, more and more, to a missing last step. Gill’s side had beaten these same opponents in Qualifier 1 only a week earlier, then lost the rematch that counted. They will spend the break asking why a batting order so reliable across the league kept caving under the lights of the one game that decides everything.
RCB will not pause to sympathize. A year ago, on this same ground, they ended an eighteen-year wait, and Kohli wept as the final ball was bowled, framing the title as one for the supporters as much as the team. Retaining it makes Bengaluru only the third franchise to go back to back, after Chennai and Mumbai, and recasts last season’s release as the start of something heavier.
The shape of the night was unkind to Gujarat throughout. RCB were ahead from the third over and never seriously pressed after it. Patidar, who has now lifted the trophy in each of his first two seasons in charge and joined MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma as the only captains to retain the IPL title, said at the toss that the 2025 win was only a memory and that his team had to live in the present. They did. The present looks a great deal like the recent past.
What the evening did not settle is how much longer the man at its center means to keep doing this. Kohli plays only one format for India now, the fifty-over game, after stepping away from Tests and Twenty20 internationals, and the IPL is where the shot-making he unlocked after that Test exit still has a stage. At 37, with two titles in two years and his fastest fifty to go with the second, talk of an ending feels early. It will come anyway. For one more night in Ahmedabad, there was no answer worth giving.
