Mumbai lose four, then win everything
The eighth IPL ran from 8 April to 24 May 2015. Mumbai Indians lost their first four matches. By the third week of April they were bottom of the table and the arithmetic looked finished. What followed was the strongest run of the season: eight wins in their last ten league games, second place, and a title.
Chennai Super Kings topped the league with nine wins under MS Dhoni. Royal Challengers Bangalore and Rajasthan Royals took the other playoff places. Kings XI Punjab, who had topped the table the previous year, won three matches all season.
Kohli and de Villiers at the Wankhede
The innings from 2015 that has aged best came at the Wankhede on 10 May. Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers put on 215 for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Mumbai, at the time the highest partnership for any wicket in Twenty20 cricket. De Villiers finished 133 not out from 59 balls. Bangalore made 235 for 1 and won by 39. Chris Gayle had already scored 117 off 57 against Punjab at the same ground.
David Warner took the Orange Cap with 562 runs for Sunrisers Hyderabad. Dwayne Bravo took 26 wickets for Chennai and the Purple Cap. Andre Russell, who hit at better than 190 for Kolkata Knight Riders and bowled at the death, was named Most Valuable Player. Rain interfered more than usual: three matches ended without a result, including one at Eden Gardens abandoned before a toss could be made.
Mumbai beat Chennai in Qualifier 1, and the two met again in the final at Eden Gardens on 24 May. Rohit Sharma made 50 from 26 to set the tone, Lendl Simmons 68, and Mumbai's 202 for 5 was too many. Chennai reached 161 for 8. Forty-one runs, and Mumbai's second title in three seasons.
The verdict, seven weeks later
That final was the last match Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals played for three years, though nobody in the ground knew it yet.
On 14 July 2015 the Justice R. M. Lodha Committee, appointed by the Supreme Court in January that year, delivered its findings on the 2013 spot-fixing and betting case. Gurunath Meiyappan, the Chennai team principal, and Raj Kundra, the Rajasthan co-owner, were banned from all cricket-related activity for life. India Cements and Jaipur IPL, the companies that owned the two franchises, were suspended for two years. Chennai and Rajasthan sat out the 2016 and 2017 seasons and returned in 2018. Their places were taken by two temporary sides, Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiants.
The panel's second and much longer report, submitted in December 2015, went beyond the two franchises and recommended a restructuring of the BCCI itself, which the Supreme Court would spend the next several years enforcing.
What stayed
For Mumbai fans the season is remembered for the recovery rather than the trophy, the proof that a bad April in a fourteen-match league is survivable. For everyone else, 2015 is the last season of the old eight, the one after which the table had two unfamiliar names on it.