Till 2024, the Royal Challengers Bengaluru were considered one of the teams in the IPL. They had reached the finals on three occasions and lost each of them.
In those nine years, the best performance was in 2016, while the 2017 and 2019 seasons saw the team finish right at the bottom. Imagine a team having the likes of Chris Gayle, Shane Watson, KL Rahul, AB De Villiers, and Yuzvendra Chahal and yet going on to lose the finals in front of their home fans? Unfathomable right? It sure was.
In 2021, Kohli quit the captaincy role after his team were knocked out in the playoffs. Faf Du Plessis replaced the Delhi batter, but the results were still not good. Playoffs in 2022 and 2024 and a 6th-place finish in 2023 saw the South African star step down, and in came Rajat Patidar to take up the baton. No more pressure works in Virat’s favour It wasn’t like Virat wasn’t scoring runs even when he was the captain; in fact, the player had managed to score 973 runs during the 2016 season, including four centuries in that campaign.
Since Patidar took over, the team management has seen changes, and the veteran star has gotten a huge lease of life. It was almost like Andy Flower, Dinesh Karthik, and Mo Bobat told the batter to forget the pressure and enjoy the game. In the last two seasons, the batter has scored 1332 runs from mere 31 fames with one century and 13 fifties, and his strike-rate too has gone up considerably. At one stage, when the entire load of the team was on his shoulders, the team was no longer dependent on Virat.
The likes of Phil Salt, Venkatesh Iyer, Devdutt Padikkal, and Patidar himself had taken over the run-scoring mantle equally. For example, the right-hander scored two successive ducks and had it been his old team, it would have crumbled in IPL 2026. But with a hand around the shoulders and clear thoughts in place, the cricketer was able to come back to form and score a ton against KKR. No longer the lone ranger on the field Yet again, the task of leading a batting unit and also leading them to their first IPL title was way too much for the former Indian skipper.
Since 2025, it has been seen that the team management has made the 37-year-old a key part of the decision-making, but the voices are plural. Jitesh Sharma from behind the stumps has been a key figure in terms of DRS calls and other stuff. The likes of Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar are leading the line with the ball, and they don’t have to turn to their former skipper seeking guidance or waiting for things to happen. The best feature about the current RCB unit is that each member has to put on their thinking shoes.
If it wasn’t the picture on the tele showed that the players in the teams gone by waited for their iconic number 18 to take a call before something happened on the field. After scoring his fastest fifty in the league, the veteran star remarked during the post-match interaction that it was a fun challenge to reinvent himself. Virat Kohli 2.0 version is enthralling everyone, and one wonders how far this version will go during the 2027 season.