Rajat Patidar Ended the Longest Wait in the IPL

Royal Challengers Bengaluru spent eighteen seasons as the IPL's great cautionary tale. They had the highest-profile batting line-ups in the competition's history, the loudest home ground, three lost finals and no trophy. Every attempt to fix it involved a famous name: Virat Kohli led them for eight seasons, Daniel Vettori and Gary Kirsten coached them, Faf du Plessis captained them for three years, and none of it worked.

What eventually worked was handing the job to Rajat Patidar, a batter from Indore with no prior IPL captaincy experience, who had played a grand total of a handful of internationals and who most casual viewers would have struggled to place in a photograph. That is the argument this record supports: not that Patidar is a great player, which the numbers do not claim, but that the thing Bengaluru had been missing for eighteen years was never a bigger name.

The innings that got him noticed

Patidar's first significant contribution to Bengaluru's cause came in 2022, and it remains the single best innings of his career. He had joined the squad mid-season as a replacement signing — he had, by his own account, postponed his wedding to take the call-up — and by the Eliminator at Eden Gardens he was opening.

Against Lucknow Super Giants he made 112 not out from 54 balls, with twelve fours and seven sixes, taking Bengaluru to 207 for 4 and a fourteen-run win. It was the first century by an uncapped Indian in the IPL playoffs, and it remains the only hundred made in an Eliminator. Reaching three figures in 49 balls also made it the fastest IPL century by an uncapped player. Dinesh Karthik, who was in the dressing room, described it afterwards as probably the best innings by an uncapped player he had seen; Kohli was similarly effusive.

For a player who had spent years as a heavy scorer in the Madhya Pradesh middle order without anybody outside the domestic circuit noticing, it was the moment of arrival. It did not immediately translate into a settled place, which is the usual fate of an innings like that.

Why the captaincy decision was less strange than it looked

When Bengaluru appointed him for 2025, replacing du Plessis, the announcement was greeted with a good deal of scepticism, most of it reasonable. Patidar had never captained in the IPL. His overall IPL record — a shade over 1,600 runs across five seasons — was solid rather than commanding. And the franchise had just declined to retain a captain who had led them to the playoffs.

The reasoning the franchise gave was that they wanted an Indian captain, on the grounds that the IPL is an Indian competition played on Indian pitches against predominantly Indian bowlers, and that leadership under those conditions benefits from a lifetime of playing in them. It is a defensible argument and it is also, notably, an argument about conditions rather than about star quality — a departure from how Bengaluru had thought about their side for most of their existence.

The other part of the case was the one nobody outside the domestic game was tracking. Patidar had captained Madhya Pradesh in both the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and the Vijay Hazare Trophy in 2024-25. He was not an inexperienced captain. He was an inexperienced IPL captain, which is a different and much smaller gap.

The title

Bengaluru won the 2025 IPL, their first in eighteen attempts, with Patidar in charge. That sentence is the whole of his significance to the competition's history, and no amount of analysis of his batting average alters it.

What the campaign showed, more than anything Patidar did with a bat, was a change in how the side was organised. Bengaluru had historically been a team built as a collection of individually magnificent batters with a bowling attack assembled from whatever was left — a structure that produced enormous totals at the Chinnaswamy and very little away from it. The title-winning side was better balanced, more willing to win ugly, and noticeably better at defending totals on grounds where 200 was not available. Kohli remained the talisman and the leading run-scorer; the difference was that the team no longer depended on him producing a match-winning innings to have a chance.

Whether a captain deserves credit for that is one of the oldest unresolvable arguments in cricket, and it should be left unresolved rather than settled by assertion. What can be said plainly is that the franchise made a specific and unpopular decision, executed it, and got the result it had been chasing since 2008. Patidar was retained as captain for the 2026 season, which suggests the franchise itself does not regard the outcome as an accident.

The batter, honestly assessed

Patidar's IPL batting record is the record of a good middle-order Twenty20 player, not a great one. Around 1,600 runs across five seasons for a single franchise, with the 112 not out as the standout, tells you he is capable of a violent match-winning innings and not reliably capable of it. His international career, similarly, has been brief — a few Tests and a scattering of white-ball appearances — and has not so far produced a case for a settled place.

That is a real limit and there is no point dressing it up. He is not in the conversation with the batters the franchise built its previous eighteen years around, and his selection as captain was never a bet on his run-scoring.

What his domestic record supports is a different claim: he has been one of the more productive batters in Indian domestic cricket across formats for several years, in a system where that kind of consistency is genuinely difficult, and he arrived in the IPL captaincy having already done the job at first-class and one-day level for his state. The IPL tends to notice players only when they hit a franchise television audience. Patidar had been good for a while before anyone was looking.

What the eighteen years actually needed

The received explanation for Bengaluru's long failure was always some version of star imbalance: too many batters, not enough bowlers, and a home ground that flattered the batting and punished the bowling. That is broadly correct as a description of the squads, and it explains a great deal.

But the franchise had known that for a decade and had repeatedly tried to fix it by buying better bowlers, which is the intuitive solution and did not work. What changed in 2025 was less glamorous: a leadership choice made on cricketing rather than reputational grounds, and a side selected to be competitive in all conditions rather than devastating in one.

Set that against the way other franchises had solved the same problem. Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians built their dynasties around continuity of structure — the same captain, the same roles, the same defensive plans, year after year. Bengaluru's history was the opposite: constant reinvention around whoever was the biggest name available. Handing the side to a domestic captain nobody had heard of was, in that context, the first genuinely structural decision the franchise had made in years.

The trophy does not make Patidar a great cricketer. It makes him the answer to a question the history of Indian cricket's most-watched franchise had been getting wrong since 2008, and the answer turned out not to be a name at all.