There was nothing flashy about Virat Kohli’s latest innings, just the familiar blend of timing, nerve and that uncanny sense of the chase. Royal Challengers Bengaluru hunted down 206 with five wickets and four balls in hand on Friday evening, and, once again, it felt as though Kohli had mapped the route long before anyone else saw it.
“He’s a genius,” Dale Steyn said on the TimeOut show afterwards, shaking his head and breaking into a grin that looked half admiration, half disbelief. The former RCB quick went on: “He’s always looking to try and get better. He plays what’s in front of him. He reads the situation. Probably one of the best players that I’ve ever known that reads the situation and calculates how the game needs to be panned out from the first ball that he’s faced.”
Kohli finished with 81 from 44 balls, strike rate 184.09, reclaiming the orange cap with 328 runs in seven matches this season. The numbers are stark, but Steyn’s bigger point was about method: “He’s kind of worked out a road to get to the final runs. He’s the best chaser to have ever played the game.”
At the other end Devdutt Padikkal, who smashed 55 in 27 deliveries, echoed the sentiment: “When we went into the dressing room [after the GT innings], we felt they were probably 15-20 runs short,” he admitted. His partnership of 115 in 59 balls with Kohli all but settled the contest before the last five overs.
Padikkal tried to pin down why Kohli remains so influential. “Although he’s achieved everything that is there to be achieved in this game, he still continues to give his 100% in every single practice session and every single match that he plays. And that kind of commitment is very hard to find. And when you see someone really so driven and so passionate about the game, it really rubs off to everybody in the side as well. I’m sure his energy is helping everyone in the team.”
The Titans’ 205 for six, built around Shubman Gill’s brisk fifty and a late burst from Rahul Tewatia, looked perfectly serviceable on an ordinary Chinnaswamy night. But ‘ordinary’ and this ground rarely coexist, and Ian Bishop, analysing alongside Steyn, quickly identified where the gap emerged. “The tempo,” he noted, praising Kohli’s ability to accelerate without panic.
Later Bishop expanded on a theme that has followed Kohli for a decade: adjustment. “The evolution of those numbers for a guy who is in his mid-30s now, [that he] continues to evolve in a game that has gone high-tempo and high-gear is to me extraordinary, that he’s been able to do this and find a role for himself in such a position.”
It is easy to forget that Kohli’s strike-rate story was once the stick critics used. Across his first 12 IPL seasons, he cracked 140 only three times; since 2024 he has sat comfortably above it, nudging 154.70 in 2024, 144.71 the following year and now 163.18. The volume remains ridiculous – 973 runs in 2016 still towers over everyone – but the tempo, that word again, has subtly shifted.
RCB’s chase wasn’t flawless. Faf du Plessis fell cheaply, and Glenn Maxwell’s brief cameo ended in the deep. Yet neither moment threatened to derail the innings because Kohli’s plan, that “road”, felt intact. Simple touch strokes turned into twos, the occasional slower ball disappeared, and the noise inside the ground built in predictable waves.
Padikkal summed up the dressing-room effect of playing alongside him. “When you see someone really so driven and so passionate about the game, it really rubs off to everybody in the side,” he repeated, almost as if saying it once didn’t do the feeling justice.
The victory nudges RCB further into the congested top half, while Gujarat, solid but not ruthless, will know 15 more might have made all the difference. Even so, they are hardly the first side to leave Bengaluru wondering where exactly the match slipped away. Often, it is at the precise moment Kohli silently calculates the target, spots a gap, and starts walking that “road to get to the final runs.”
