Krunal Pandya: Two IPL Finals, Eight Years Apart

The Player of the Match award in an IPL final has almost always gone to the obvious sort of cricketer: an opener who made 80, a fast bowler who took three in the powerplay, a finisher who hit the last over for eighteen. Only one player has won it twice. He is not an opener or a fast bowler, he has never taken twenty wickets in a season, his career batting average is 22.78 and his career bowling average is 31.87, and the two awards came eight years apart for two different franchises.

Krunal Pandya won the 2017 final with a 47 off 38 balls for Mumbai Indians in a match where 130 was a competitive total. He won the 2025 final with two wickets for seventeen runs off four overs for Royal Challengers Bengaluru, a side that had waited eighteen years for a title. Between those two nights he played 147 matches and was, for most of them, a cricketer whose value was almost impossible to see in a scorecard.

The record that looks unremarkable

Set out plainly, Krunal's IPL career reads like a squad player's. In 123 innings he has 1,982 runs at 22.78, with three fifties and a highest score of 86. In 147 matches he has 107 wickets at 31.87. Neither line would get a player retained on its own.

The number that matters is next to the bowling average and gets less attention: an economy rate of 7.56 across 2,707 deliveries. That is the whole career, spanning eleven seasons in which the competition's overall scoring rate climbed sharply, and it is why he kept getting picked. Krunal has never been a bowler who takes the ball to get wickets. He is a bowler captains use to make an over disappear, and in a format where the difference between a good and bad bowling side is roughly a run an over, doing that four times a night for a decade is a career.

Season	Team	Inns	Runs	SR	Season role
2016	Mumbai Indians	8	237	191.1	breakout as a hitter
2017	Mumbai Indians	11	243	135.8	title, final award
2018-2021	Mumbai Indians	50	663	120.7	bowling all-rounder
2022-2024	Lucknow Super Giants	38	504	121.8	senior spinner
2025	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	7	109	126.7	title, final award
2026	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	9	226	145.8	middle-order rebuild

The middle of that table is the honest part. Between 2018 and 2024, across seven seasons and 88 innings, Krunal struck at around 121 and did not make a single fifty. For a left-hander picked partly as a middle-order hitter, that is a long stretch of being not very good at half the job.

2016: the season that created the reputation

The reputation arrived before the record did, and that is worth explaining because it shaped a decade of selection. In 2016, his first real season, Krunal made 237 runs from eight innings at a strike rate of 191.1 — including 86 against Chennai Super Kings — with 13 sixes from 124 balls faced. A left-hander clearing the ground at nearly two runs a ball in the middle overs was, in 2016, a rare and valuable thing.

He never came close to repeating it. The strike rate fell to 135.8 the following season and then into the 120s for most of the next seven years. What happened is not mysterious: bowlers worked out that he was strong down the ground and vulnerable to the ball held back and angled across him, and he did not have the range to solve it. But the 2016 season had already established him in the market as a hitter who bowls, and franchises kept buying that description long after his figures had stopped supporting it.

The 2017 final, won with the bat

Mumbai and Rising Pune Supergiant met at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad in a final that produced 129 for 8 from the side batting first, and Krunal made 47 of them from 38 balls. In context that innings is close to extraordinary: nobody else in the match passed fifty, the pitch was doing enough to make strokeplay a gamble, and Mumbai's 129 remains the lowest total successfully defended in an IPL final. He also bowled four overs for 31 without taking a wicket.

Pune finished on 128 for 6, and Mumbai won by one run. It was decided by a margin narrow enough that any single over of Krunal's four, or any four balls of his 38, can reasonably be called the difference. He was 26, in his second full season, and the natural reading at the time was that a major career was starting.

The seven years in between

It was not, or not in the way anyone expected. Krunal's Mumbai years from 2018 to 2021 produced diminishing batting returns and steady bowling: 183 runs at 16.6 in 2019, 109 at 18.2 in 2020, 143 at 14.3 in 2021. He was part of two more title-winning squads without being central to either.

He moved to Lucknow Super Giants in 2022 as one of their senior professionals and spent three seasons bowling holding overs in the middle, which he did well, and batting at six or seven, which he did without distinction. His most useful contribution in that period was probably the least visible: bowling into the powerplay when the captain needed to protect a seamer, a job that costs a spinner his economy rate and his wickets column and shows up nowhere.

His international career followed a similar arc and had a similar shape. He played T20Is and ODIs for India across several stretches from 2018, took a five-wicket haul in an ODI against England at Pune in 2021, and made the fastest fifty on T20I debut, off 18 balls against the West Indies in 2018. It was never a settled place — India's spin-bowling all-rounder slot in that era belonged to Ravindra Jadeja, and behind him to Axar Patel — and Krunal's caps came in the gaps.

2025, and the second award

Royal Challengers Bengaluru signed him for 2025, when he was 34, and used him for seven innings and a full bowling allocation. He made 109 runs, took his usual quiet wickets, and then bowled the four overs that won them the competition.

The figures from the final at Ahmedabad were 2 for 17. He dismissed Prabhsimran Singh and, in his last over, Josh Inglis. Punjab were held to 184 chasing 191, and RCB won by six runs to take a title they had been trying to win since 2008. As in 2017, the margin was small enough that four overs at an economy of 4.25 in a match where the average over cost more than nine is a defensible answer to the question of who won it.

That made him the first player to be named Player of the Match in two IPL finals. The symmetry is neat to the point of being slightly absurd: the first award was for batting in a match where he took no wickets, the second for bowling in a match where he made a handful of runs.

What actually explains it

There is a temptation to call this luck, and with a sample of two it cannot be ruled out. But there is a more specific explanation available, and it is about what finals are like rather than what Krunal is like.

Finals in this competition are disproportionately low-scoring. The pitches are used, the occasion tightens batters up, and the sides are the two best bowling attacks left. In that environment the two most valuable skills are the ones Krunal has always had: batting competently when the ball is not coming off the middle, and bowling four overs that cannot be attacked. His weaknesses — no top gear with the bat, few wickets — are the weaknesses that matter least in a 130-run game and most in a 220-run one.

Put another way, Krunal is not a better cricketer in finals. He is the same cricketer, in the conditions that suit him, twice, on the only two nights that get remembered.

The late upturn

The 2026 season is the odd coda. At 35, in his second year at Bengaluru, Krunal made 226 runs from nine innings at 37.7 with a strike rate of 145.8 — his best batting season since 2016 by every measure that matters, including a fifty and eleven sixes. It is a small sample and it may mean nothing. It is also the first time in a decade that his batting figures have looked like the reputation he acquired in 2016.

Whatever else the record shows, it makes the case that the league rewards a narrower kind of usefulness than the highlight reels suggest. A left-arm spinner with 107 wickets at 31.87 and a batting average of 22.78 has, in Indian cricket terms, an unremarkable career — and he has decided two title deciders, which is more than almost anybody.

Sources and method

IPL career and season figures come from official competition records and are cross-checked against this site's own match dataset. Details of the 2017 final at Hyderabad and the 2025 final at Ahmedabad, including bowling figures and the Player of the Match awards, follow official scorecards and match reports. The international details — the 2018 T20I debut fifty and the 2021 ODI five-wicket haul against England — are drawn from published scorecards. No figure here has been computed from ball-by-ball data.