And then there were four. It was not until the 69th, and penultimate, match of the 10-team league phase that the final qualifier for the IPL 2026 playoffs was identified. Sunrisers Hyderabad’s 55-run defeat of defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru on Friday had cemented the top three; the champions and table leaders would face Gujarat Titans, the 2022 champions, in Qualifier 1. Hyderabad, who like the top two also finished with 18 points, had earned their place in the Playoff, waiting to see who their opponents were.
When Shreyas Iyer smashed his maiden century against Lucknow Super Giants on Saturday to halt an alarming six-match losing streak and keep the Punjab Kings in the hunt, the wait for the fourth qualifier extended to the last day of league action, in keeping with the reputation and history of the IPL. In the end, after a start-to-finish season, Rajasthan Royals, champions in the inaugural edition in 2008, earned that right with a 30-run victory over Mumbai Indians under a scorching afternoon sun at the Wankhede Stadium.
As is inevitable, those who narrowly missed out on qualifying (Punjab finished with 15 points, Delhi Capitals with 14, while 16 was the magic number with which Rajasthan reached the quarter-finals) will rue the missed opportunities, a match that passed here, a point that was lost there. The Kings will potentially point to the only no result of the tournament, against Kolkata Knight Riders at Eden Gardens, as a defining moment.
Struggling at the time to get on the points table, Ajinkya Rahane’s men, strangely opting to bat despite the threat of rain, were gasping at 25 for two when the skies opened, gifting them a much-needed first point. Who can say how the match would have turned out if PBKS, on the crest of an early wave, had had the opportunity to play a complete game?
Kings will look back and understandably wonder how they got to this point. During the first half, and more, of the league phase, they looked unstoppable and unbeatable. The no result in Calcutta was the only point they dropped in their first seven outings; With 13 points and seven games left, it wasn’t a question of whether they would make the playoffs, but rather what their final point total would be and who they might run into in Qualifier 1.
Punjab will wonder how they were eliminated after being in such a strong position. | Photo Credit: PTI
Inexorable downward spiral
Then, shockingly, without warning, Punjab embarked on an inexorable tailspin, with the celebrated leadership group of Shreyas and head coach Ricky Ponting unable to arrest the slide.
The same personnel that drove their first-half charge began to repeatedly alter their lines, their deadly bowling fell to pieces and their ground catching and fielding was abysmal. The latter development would have particularly infuriated Ponting, for two reasons: one, he was among the best defenders of his generation and two, fielding errors and dropped catches are unforgivable unforced errors.
PBKS has plenty of time (almost 10 months) to rue their self-inflicted misfortune and reflect on how they managed to embrace elimination when advancing to the next stage was infinitely the simpler and more attractive proposition. Shreyas had a great career with the bat and was tactically astute for the most part; At one point, there were calls for his promotion to the T20I captaincy at the expense of the failed Suryakumar Yadav, although those calls have died down now, but the end result is something he will struggle to reconcile with.
Delhi fell tantalizingly short on numerous occasions in closing out games, most notably against Gujarat when they needed two runs off as many deliveries with David Miller and Kuldeep Yadav in the middle. For reasons best known to him, the South African dismissed Prasidh Krishna’s penultimate ball tying single, backing himself to do the job.
It was a huge error in judgment and DC paid a high immediate and ultimate price. Kuldeep was run out off the last ball looking for the break that would have sent the game into a Super Over as Gujarat pulled off a one-run stand. Thereafter, one of only two of the original eight (apart from Punjab) who had not won the title even once struggled, struggling for consistency and crashing out despite bringing the curtain down on the league stage with a comprehensive victory over Kolkata on Sunday.
So much for the two who narrowly missed out. KKR and Chennai Super Kings bounced back from early setbacks to stay in touch with the qualification race, although they were always chasing each other and playing catch-up. The same cannot be said for the two bottom teams, Mumbai Indians and Lucknow Super Giants, who managed a frugal four wins each in 14 outings. Five-time champions Mumbai were the biggest disappointment, reiterating that big names and famous superstars do not guarantee success.
Lucknow is now licking its wounds and already contemplating changes, including in its leadership after ₹27 crore signee Rishabh Pant had another modest season with the bat and has now led the team to just 10 wins in 28 outings across two campaigns.
Left-handed batsmen (mainly openers) and fast bowlers stole the individual honours, none more so than the youngest player in the history of the competition. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi celebrated his 15th birthday just a day before IPL 2026 began on March 28. He celebrated that milestone in extraordinary fashion, sending shivers down the spines of some of the most illustrious bowlers of the modern era. He instilled fear and uncertainty, hypnotized and entertained with a variety of strikes that screamed fearlessness and great class. He didn’t forgive anyone, not Josh Hazlewood or Jasprit Bumrah, not Kagiso Rabada or Mitchell Starc. When was the last time you watched a single-player game? And that too for a 15 year old boy?
The good news, for everyone else except the bowling fraternity, is that there’s more of Sooryavanshi in store. He showed he wasn’t some otherworldly being thrown at us with a six-ball four against MI on Sunday, but that means he will be even more loaded against Sunrisers in New Chandigarh on Wednesday.
Already this season he has had two interesting encounters with the 2016 winners. In Hyderabad, a month and a half ago, he died on the first ball, caught in the delivery of debutant pacer Praful Hinge. The retribution was quick and only took 12 days to arrive. In the second leg in Jaipur, he scored the third-fastest IPL century, off 36 deliveries (he also holds the record for the second-fastest, lest we forget), treating Praful with disdain and hitting Sakib Hussain, who had also taken four wickets on debut alongside his pace partner.
Hyderabad won both games, by 57 runs and five wickets, but captain Pat Cummins and head coach Daniel Vettori won’t read anything into those results as they head into the first real knockout game of the competition. They know there’s more to RR than Sooryavanshi (yes, although it’s easy to lose track of that sometimes), but a lot of their attention will be focused on stopping the boy wonder because, well, he’s the boy wonder.
Topping the charts
Sooryavanshi finished the league phase as the fifth highest scorer, with 583 runs, only behind Sai Sudharsan, Shubman Gill, Heinrich Klaasen and KL Rahul. Among those with more than 400 runs, he is one of only two batsmen with a strike rate of more than 200; his 232.27 is comfortably better than Abhishek Sharma’s 206.22 and these two left-handers also have the most sixes where, again, Sooryavanshi is clearly ahead, with 53 ‘highs’ as against 43 in the Hyderabad opener. Therefore, Wednesday will witness a battle within a battle, with the winner living to fight another night and the loser taking an early flight home.
The two top scorers in the competition are Sai Sudharsan and Gill of Gujarat, with 638 and 616 runs respectively. But interestingly, as if to reinforce the belief that batsmen win matches while bowlers win tournaments, the GT bow unit has accounted for over 100 wickets, making them the only franchise to surpass that milestone in this edition. Their charge has been led by the excellent Kagiso Rabada and the fantastic Afghan Rashid Khan, who has purged a shortage in recent years with 19 wickets to go with an economy of 8.71. Rabada’s 24 wickets are the highest along with Bhuvneshwar Kumar, RCB’s ageless wonder who holds the Purple Cap due to a superior economy rate of 8.07 compared to his South African counterpart’s 9.18.
Rabada and Mohammed Siraj, who has taken 17 wickets, are in a personal battle for the most dot balls bowled in the competition. Between them, the Rabada-Rashid-Siraj trio have 60 wickets which, allied with Prasidh’s 14 and Jason Holder’s 13, paint the picture of a wicket-hungry group that has backed the heroics of its openers and the explosive No. 3, Jos Buttler.
The GT bowling attack, led by Rabada and Siraj, has constantly worried the rival teams. | Photo credit: R. Ragu
Maximizing your depth
RCB have only one bowler among the top 12 players and one batsman (Virat Kohli, ninth, with 557 runs) among the top 15 run-makers, but clearly, they have maximized their depth in both departments, which explains their status as the top of the table.
They were forced to split the opening combination of Kohli and Phil Salt after the latter suffered a finger injury, and Salt’s replacement Jacob Bethell flew back home, also with a finger injury. In his absence, Venkatesh Iyer has stepped up nicely, while at No. 3, Devdutt Padikkal has been wonderful to watch with his quick ball-striking and a renewed mindset that allowed him to score at 171.82.
Rajat Patidar, who ended a long wait by leading the team to its first trophy last season, scored 393 runs at a strike rate of 183.64, while Tim David is a dangerously ferocious presence in the middle order. This is the fulcrum around which the batting has revolved, while the bowling has been propped up, after Bhuvneshwar, by Rasikh Salam and the wily Krunal Pandya, although Hazlewood has been up and down.
So, everything is on the line as we head into the final week. Bengaluru and Gujarat will take two bites of the cherry by finishing 1-2, while Hyderabad and Rajasthan are at the point of no return. It has taken almost two months to reach this stage; Now it’s all about the next six nights.