In Sydney in January 2004, Sachin Tendulkar conjured a remarkable innings in the last of four Tests against Australia, an effort that brought him his highest Test score at the time. His unbeaten 241 was noteworthy not for the extraordinary strokes he played, but for the commonplace ones he did not.
For most of the first three Tests, the little fella was sucked into driving outside off and nicking off, so he decided ahead of the SCG showdown that the offside didn’t exist for him as a run-making option. It’s one thing to decide, quite another to execute a plan of that magnitude, but Tendulkar was anything but mere mortal, so he channelled his inner discipline, took the offside out of the equation and still boasted a strike-rate of 55.27 in an innings that spanned 436 deliveries.
Without making a similar conscious effort, Virat Kohli emulated the master at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Sunday night. His first 38 runs, in the final against Gujarat Titans, all came through the onside; in all, he scored only seven runs through the offside as he finished unbeaten on 75. An essay punctuated by wristy flicks and whips, rasping pulls and glorious aerial strokes down the straight field culminated in the Player of the Final award as Royal Challengers Bengaluru became just the third franchise, after Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, to successfully defend its title.
Bengaluru’s fabulous bowling attack, spearheaded by the evergreen Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Josh Hazlewood, had done a stellar job in keeping Gujarat down to 155 for eight, at least 30 short of a competitive total. There were no demons in the surface, so a required rate of just under eight was straightforward, unthreatening, relatively no-fuss. The stage was set for Kohli, the ultimate master of the chase, to anchor Bengaluru’s reply, one thought.
Well, Kohli didn’t think that way. The 2.0 version decided to stand up again as he took on and destroyed Gujarat’s new-ball battering rams, Mohammed Siraj and Kagiso Rabada, with impunity. Every time the two right-arm quicks bowled straight lines, which was frequently, Kohli peppered the legside boundary unapologetically. With Venkatesh Iyer doing his bit, Bengaluru furiously closed in on the frugal target through their openers.
Not even when Venkatesh and Devdutt Padikkal fell in successive overs, or Rajat Patidar and Krunal Pandya perished in the same Rashid Khan over, did Kohli hold back. He didn’t dial down his aggression when, midway through his innings, he picked up what Ravi Shastri termed a leg muscle injury. There was a glint in his eyes, a steel to his determination, that was unmistakable. Kohli wasn’t content with a stroll in the park; he was driven to mark his territory uninhibitedly. The result – his fastest ever IPL half-century (he has 68 of those to go with nine hundreds), off a mere 25 deliveries.
Kohli tears up the script
Kohli is no slouch when batting first, but when he has a target ahead of him, he is a beast transformed. Not for the first time, he showcased his felicity in hunting down a total, though this time, a clinically calculated approach was replaced by a frenzied onslaught, as if he had several personal scores to settle. Kohli has had numerous personal and collective heartbreaks in IPL finals, and even when Bengaluru lifted their maiden title last year, he was laboured and shackled during an innings-high 35-ball 43. On Sunday, he set the IPL record straight with a knock for the ages, reiterating his standing as the greatest chaser in the history of the white-ball game.
This was the second time in three tries that Kohli aced a T20 final. The first was in June 2024, against South Africa in the T20 World Cup. Ahead of the title clash, Kohli had an unedifying 75 runs for the tournament, singularly disappointing for a champion of his calibre. Even in the final, his stay was tortured, the momentum conspicuously absent. His 48-ball fifty was the second slowest in a T20 World Cup final, and comfortably Kohli’s slowest, but he made amends with 26 runs from his next 11 deliveries. His 76 was the highest score of a final India somehow clinched by seven runs, and brought him the Player of the Final honours as he sang the redemption song in style.
Kohli came into the IPL 2026 final with a mountain of runs – 600 of them, to be precise – under his belt, scored at a strike-rate of more than 160. He was both the talisman and the enforcer, the bulwark around whom Venkatesh and Padikkal, Patidar and Tim David and Pandya operated. As opposed to his go-slow at the Kensington Oval, Kohli was the destroyer at the Narendra Modi Stadium, geeing himself up for the stage and the occasion and leaving no doubts about who the showstopper was. Why should we have expected anything different, really?