Yellow again
The eleventh IPL was the season Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals came back. Two years of suspension for the 2013 betting case had ended, the auction had been a scramble to rebuild two squads from nothing, and Chennai's approach to it was mocked from the day the hammer fell. They bought experience. Dhoni, Raina, Watson, Bravo, Harbhajan, Rayudu, du Plessis. Dad's Army, everybody called it, and then Dad's Army won the thing.
The opening night at the Wankhede set the tone. Mumbai Indians made 165 for 4. Chennai were nowhere until Dwayne Bravo hit 68 off 30 and the last pair scrambled home with a ball to spare. One wicket. That match told you what the season would be about.
Chennai barely played at home. After protests over the Kaveri water dispute, their remaining home fixtures were moved to Pune on 11 April; the two playoff games originally allotted to Pune were then shifted to Kolkata to keep things clean. Dhoni's team spent most of the season in yellow in front of borrowed crowds and it made no difference at all.
The final that lasted 18.3 overs
Sunrisers Hyderabad were the best-drilled side of the league stage. Kane Williamson made 735 runs, more than anyone had managed in a single IPL season to that point, and the bowling of Rashid Khan, Siddarth Kaul and Bhuvneshwar Kumar was the tightest in the tournament. They topped the table, lost Qualifier 1 to Chennai, then beat Kolkata in Qualifier 2 to get another crack at them.
Hyderabad made 178 for 6 at the Wankhede. Shane Watson, who had been dropped, benched and written off more than once in his career, walked out and made 117 not out off 57 balls. Chennai got there in 18.3 overs with eight wickets standing. It was not close, which is the strangest thing about a season that had been close all the way through.
Elsewhere, Andrew Tye took the Purple Cap with 24 wickets for Kings XI Punjab, Sunil Narine was Most Valuable Player after Kolkata pushed him up to open, and Rishabh Pant made 684 runs for Delhi Daredevils, including 128 not out, in the innings that turned him into a national conversation. Three matches were decided by DLS. None went to a Super Over.
What it changed
This was the first IPL to use DRS, which sounds like an administrative footnote and was not. Captains suddenly had to think about reviews in the last over. It also introduced a mid-season transfer window for uncapped players, an idea that never really caught on.
Mostly, though, 2018 restored the league's own history. Chennai's return with a squad older than any in the competition, winning at a canter, killed the notion that T20 belonged only to twenty-somethings. Dhoni was 36 and reading the game better than anyone in it. Rajasthan came back too, made the Eliminator and lost it, but the point was that they were there.
Two seasons of an eight-team league without its two most stubborn franchises had felt like a placeholder. From 2018 the IPL looked like itself again.