Bengaluru’s batting did not look in its best form against Delhi.Image Credit source: PTI
The current champion Royal Challengers Bangalore has continuously shown the power of its explosive batting in IPL 2026. Since last season, under the captaincy of Rajat Patidar, Bengaluru has emerged as the most explosive batting line-up of the league. This trend continues in this season also. But in the match against Delhi Capitals, Bengaluru’s batting lost its strength and for the first time this season the team could not touch the 200 mark.
Bengaluru faced Delhi in the afternoon match on Saturday 18 April at its home ground M Chinnaswamy Stadium. In this match, host RCB batted first and what was expected happened. The pitch did not support the batsmen much. However once again for the team Virat Kohli And Phil Salt had made an explosive start and this time too the team seemed to be moving towards a big score.
24 balls caused damage, less than 200 for the first time
But as soon as Salt was out, the brakes on RCB’s innings started. Captain Rajat Patidar also did not play this time, while Tim David also could not show the power of his bat for long. But those 24 balls caused the most damage to Bengaluru, in which the team got only 15 runs. These 24 balls were played by the team’s finishers Jitesh Sharma and Romario Shepherd. RCB needed aggressive batting from these two in the last overs but exactly the opposite happened. Jitesh scored only 14 runs in 20 balls, while Shepherd could score only 1 run in 4 balls.
The effect of this was that Bengaluru could score only 175 runs in its 20 overs. This was the first time in this season, when Bengaluru batted full 20 overs in a match but did not touch the 200-run mark. Earlier, Bengaluru had scored 203, 250, 201 and 240 runs in 4 consecutive matches. Only in the last match the team had scored 149 runs and that was because RCB was chasing the target and had scored only 147 runs.
Except Salt, rest of the batsmen failed
Talking about this match, Phil Salt scored another explosive half-century for Bengaluru. He played a strong inning of 63 runs in 38 balls. But apart from him, no other batsman could show such strength. Virat Kohli was out after scoring 19 runs after a fast start, while captain Patidar (8), Devdutt Padikkal (18) and David (26) also could not continue the fast start.
