Gujarat Titans have been winning for 5 years & nobody still knows what to say about them. That is the most Gujarat thing about Gujarat. They won in 2022 when nobody knew their names. Runners-up in 2023, losing on the final delivery. 8th in 2024 when Hardik Pandya left & rain washed out matches. 3rd in 2025 before falling to Mumbai Indians in the Eliminator. 2nd in 2026 with a shot at the final. Yet Cheteshwar Pujara was the only prominent analyst who put them in the top 4 before the season. That tells you everything about how boring their excellence looks from the outside. A win percentage of 61.42 across 5 seasons. Better than any franchise. And still the headlines go elsewhere. Ashish Nehra carries a pen & paper to the boundary. Everyone thought it was tactics. Some secret algorithm. Nehra said no. "Paper pe sirf menu tha". What they would eat at practice. Either the funniest thing a coach ever said or the most honest. Probably both. Because what Nehra is really doing is refusing to complicate what is already simple. Give a man a role. Let him grow into it. Do not change the plan because Twitter is angry. Do not treat anyone special. That is what performance analyst Sandeep Raju said and he is right. They have no middle order. People write angry posts about it. Sai Sudharsan & Shubman Gill & Jos Buttler eat up all the balls & if they fail the whole thing falls apart. It fell apart against Mumbai. 100 all out chasing 199. But when it works they are unstoppable. 7 century partnerships between Gill and Sudharsan. Most in IPL history. Sudharsan took the Orange Cap in 2025 & still leading in 2026. Gill is following him with 616 runs in 2026 at 47 average & strike rate touching 162. Numbers that do not shout. They just accumulate. Like interest in a post office account. Jason Holder came mid-season for 7 crore. Took 13 wickets in 8 games at 7.34 economy. Because they gave him a role & he filled it. They did the same with Siraj & Rabada. They chased 190 against Punjab in their first season needing 12 off 2. Tewatia hit two sixes. They chased 22 off the final over against SRH. Rashid hit 3 sixes, last one off the final ball. He told his partner not to panic if they faced a dot. Focus on the next ball. That calm comes from knowing your job so completely that pressure stops feeling like pressure. On 26th May at Dharamshala, they face RCB or SRH in Qualifier 1. Win & they go straight to the Ahmedabad final. Their home ground. The same place they lifted the trophy in 2022. Nehra will stand at the boundary in Dharamshala with his paper. The menu will probably say something about lunch. Gujarat will do what Gujarat does. Show up. Execute. Win more than they lose. It has been enough for 5 seasons. It might be enough for a second title.

Virat Kohli keeps asking the same question & the critics keep running out of answers. Since 2023, he has scored 2365 runs in 51 IPL innings. He has been dismissed for single digits just 3 times in his last 40 innings (On average, 1 single digit score per season). 13 of his last 15 innings crossed 25, 11 went past 40, 8 cleared 50. While everyone else chased highlights, he built a floor of consistency so high that failure became a stranger. Critics called him an anchor. They said T20 had moved past him, that his method was built for a slower era. So he changed the physics. The bat that used to come down straight & still started moving before the bowler released. Up, down, tap, hover. R Ashwin called it potential energy. Rest of us called it freedom. Then 2025 happened. RCB won their first title in 18 years. Kohli made 657 runs that season, nothing flashy, just a man holding his nerve while the world wobbled. The title did not relax him. It unlocked something. 2026 brought the real transformation. He quit Tests. What remained was just a batter. No format switching, no need to keep one part of his brain defensive while the other attacked. This season he hits a boundary every 4.9 balls. He strikes at 160 in the powerplay, 140 in the middle, 200 in the death. Dale Steyn watched the opener against Sunrisers Hyderabad. Kohli hit 69 not out off 38 balls, 5 sixes, a chase of 202 done in 15.2 overs. Steyn said he was hitting aerial shots time & again. A man who had stopped fearing the fall. The attacking shot percentage tells the story. 40.6 percent in 2021. Almost 75 percent in 2026. He steps down to spin now. He lofts over long on. He was the cover drive man, the wristy flick man. Now he is something messier & more dangerous. Striking at 163 this season. Averaging 54.6, which is technically a dip from his overall average of 56 since 2023. That is the level he has set. No other batter has scored more runs than him in the last 4 IPL seasons. Not Gill, Not Jaiswal, Not Buttler, Not Samson. He has also hit more sixes than all of them since 2023. The man they called slow is out-hitting the generation that was supposed to replace him. He is not surviving T20 anymore. He is still defining it. Critics will find something new. Kohli will hear them, fix what needs fixing & keep asking what is next. The bat is still moving, The red jersey is still his. And somehow, impossibly, he is just getting started.