Eighteen years, and then a week that stopped everything
Every RCB season starts the same way and 2025 was no different. Then it ended differently. Rajat Patidar's side won the title on 3 June in Ahmedabad, and a fanbase that had turned losing into an identity finally had something else to be. It took the longest season the league has staged, split down the middle by a national emergency.
The cricket before the break was already good. Sunrisers Hyderabad opened with 286 for 6 against Rajasthan Royals at Uppal. Gujarat Titans found a settled top three in Shubman Gill, Sai Sudharsan and Jos Buttler, and Sudharsan scored 759 runs to take the Orange Cap while Prasidh Krishna's 25 wickets took the Purple. Then, on 28 April in Jaipur, a fourteen-year-old from Samastipur walked out for Rajasthan and made 101 from 38 balls against Gujarat. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi had already become the youngest player to appear in the IPL. He was now the youngest to score a hundred in it, and by some distance the story of the summer.
Nine May
On 8 May the Punjab Kings and Delhi Capitals match at Dharamshala was abandoned mid-innings. The floodlights went off, the ground was cleared, and players and spectators were moved out overnight. The following day, with the India-Pakistan crisis unfolding, the BCCI suspended the tournament. Sixteen matches were still to be played. Foreign players flew home. Nobody could say whether the season would resume at all.
It resumed on 17 May, condensed into six venues instead of thirteen, with the Dharamshala match voided and no points awarded. Everything after that shifted. Punjab's home games moved to Jaipur and Ahmedabad. Chennai's fixture against Rajasthan was played in Delhi. Qualifier 1 and the Eliminator, originally set for Hyderabad, went to Mullanpur. The final, scheduled for 25 May at Eden Gardens, was played on 3 June at the Narendra Modi Stadium, eight days before the World Test Championship final at Lord's. Players came back off flights and into knockout cricket.
The final
Punjab Kings and RCB had met in Qualifier 1 at Mullanpur, where Punjab were bowled out for 101 and beaten in ten overs. The final was nothing like it. RCB were 190 for 9, a total that looked twenty light on a good Ahmedabad surface. Krunal Pandya bowled four overs for 17 and took two wickets. Shreyas Iyer kept Punjab in it until the eighteenth. They finished on 184 for 7, six short.
Virat Kohli sat down on the turf and wept. That image did more for the league's emotional stock than any advertisement of the past decade. For Punjab, a second final in eleven years ended the same way as the first.
What 2025 will be remembered for is not only the trophy. It was the season that proved the IPL could be stopped, and that stopping it was a decision the board was willing to take. It was also the season a fourteen-year-old changed what an IPL debut can look like. Results were rearranged, venues swapped, a match wiped from the record. The cricket, somehow, held.