The franchise that Kohli built
Virat Kohli meant business, and for once, so did the franchise that he helped build.
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RCB was named after a whisky. They started the IPL as a joke. They had a Test team; their opening squad had Rahul Dravid, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Misbah-ul-Haq, Anil Kumble, Wasim Jaffer and Jacques Kallis. It was bizarre, but no one knew anything about T20.
All we knew was that it would be a blast. So Vijay Mallya invited all his favourite boring arse players to his team, and then wined and dined them off the field as RCB became the party team. Drinks, fun, whatever you wanted. Win or loss, celebrate like champions.
The problem was that everyone else had more fun on the field, and RCB had to clean up the mess afterwards. They were serious up front and party out the back, and in both ways they sucked.
They were the punchline, the butt of all jokes, their fans pined as hard as anyone, surely they should have even won a title by luck. But no, just suck. Constant, generational suck. They were funny, all while having the most serious player in the world on their side.
Virat Kohli meant business, RCB did not.
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Virat Kohli is RCB. He was a batter, and they were about batting. Their ground is about batting, their owners were about batting. They loved batters – old Test guys, the big-hitting T20 ones and the popular ones. They made so many runs, but their problem was always in stopping them.
This is a franchise that one year ended up using Corey Anderson’s bowling at the death. And Corey Anderson didn’t really bowl anymore, and even at his best shouldn’t have been used at the death. Even when they have found good bowlers, it has gone to hell.
When you look at this team on paper, the only issue they could have had was wickets. They matched three different economical bowlers together, and that completely worked. No one made any runs against them. Josh Hazlewood was nuts, going at 1.50 runs an over less than expected.
If they all had seasons with no wickets – as they often do – it would still have been tough to win it all. But Bhuvneshwar Kumar took the most wickets he has in a year since 2017.
Krunal Pandya went a step further. He had never taken more than 12 wickets in a year. This season, he knew he had to be more attacking. That is an easy thing to say, but he nailed it. Taking more wickets than he ever has before.
You include Hazlewood, who has rarely been a strike bowler, but certainly was this year. Suddenly, the long lost cause of RCB bowlers came to an end.
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Legacy is a hard thing to manage. People curate their image, brand and exposure just perfectly, then something external happens to them and it doesn’t work. Virat Kohli has been carefully manipulating how he looks, sounds and is presented for a very long time. And through that, we have the VK brand: fierce, passionate and driven. But he’s not associated with winning as much as I’m sure he would love to be.
The first 50-over World Cup was before King Kohli emerged. The last T20 World Cup was after a decade of failure. There were no WTC trophies, or IPL ones.
Right now, the most important thing in cricket is still World Cups. So part of Kohli’s legacy would have been saved, no matter what. But if, in 20 years’ time, IPL trophies are on the same level, and he has none while Dhoni and Rohit have tons, people start to question.
It isn’t fair, but that is how sports conversations work. Steven Gerrard had to win a trophy, Dirk Nowitzki too. They weren’t better players because they had them, it just allowed people to say they got one.
RCB had plenty of chances.
In 2009, they were chasing only 144 when my podcast partner Robbie Uthappa couldn’t get them over the line. In 2016, they went after a huge total with Gayle and Kohli smashing the ball everywhere, until they ended up eight runs short. In 2015, they missed out on the second chance because of a rule about the amount of wins they had.
So while RCB were failing, India also couldn’t win a trophy.
Guess the common denominator there. I remember the first time I saw the word ‘Chokli’ appear on social media. It’s a weird thing for cricket. Because in the NBA, you get it. There are only five players on the court, and the star player is probably worth 30% of their chance of winning. If you don’t win a title, it kind of gets attached to them a little bit. That just isn’t the case in cricket.
But nuance gets lost in legacy. There is not a doubt that eventually, Kohli just had to win one. Otherwise, those who asterisk great players would add one to his name.
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It is actually hard to know at times when RCB start and Kohli ends. There is no separation between the two. Every decision, rebuild, signing, auction or coaching appointment was done through him, for him or around him. This was the franchise that Kohli built. Or maybe the best way of saying this is: this was the franchise that was poorly built around him.
There is no doubt that Vijay Mallya wanted to win, but he also wanted to party on the way there. He was like a more fun version of Richard Branson, and so everything had to be loud and his way.
Most of my dealings with him were on the owners’ calls at the CPL, where he would loudly talk about things that bothered him, that had nothing to do with the meeting at hand. And really, nothing to do with anything the CPL could control. It was loud, fun, and completely about him.
His IPL franchise was largely the same.
Until he decided to leave the country for non-cricket reasons. Diageo took over the franchise, and while they brought in more stability and less partying (although from a similar industry), it was still a mess.
For the 2018 IPL auction, they had three different groups advising them on analytics. I know this, because I was one of the groups. They asked me to work for them, but as I was with ESPNcricinfo at the time, I said I would do it for free – both to learn and also to stop any conflict of interest. For about a week, I did auction preparation for them and provided them with key players I thought they should pick.
Then on the day of the auction, I was no longer needed. So I was back working for Cricinfo. And they contacted me to see how I thought they’d gone. Not well was my reply. The next day was my only one not working for anyone in weeks, and I had to do my laundry, and had booked in a massage to deal with a back issue I had. So in a random laundromat in Melbourne, I was suddenly answering many calls from India about players for day two. My laptop was next to my laundry detergent, vibrating on the washing machine as I gave them my research on the players they were looking at.
Then the auction started, and I headed off for my massage. Ten minutes in, the masseuse said I better get to my phone, as it hadn’t stopped vibrating. I picked it up and RCB were blowing up my phone. So after a quick break or two for a call, I went back to the massage. But my phone didn’t stop. So this time, I laid down on the table, with my phone underneath and my arms around it, as I looked through the whole and replied to all the texts I was getting.
Three years later, the new IPL franchises came in and were valued at around a billion dollars.
So with RCB being one of the major brands in the IPL, who knows what they would be worth if you wanted to buy them. But let’s just say they were worth a lot of money with the most famous player on the planet on their side. And I am in my undies, listening to Muzak, while a woman massages my lower back as I am sending WhatsApp messages about Nathan Coulter-Nile.
They were simply not as professional back then as they should have been. Now look at their off field team. Mo Bobat, Andy Flower, Freddie Wilde and Dinesh Karthik are smart, driven professionals. It’s really clear they are all working together. Rajat Patidar had to captain one of cricket’s loudest voices in the franchise he helped build – with his own batting form not great – and he handled it like he’d been doing it for years.
The weird thing about RCB was that in Kohli, they had one of the most professional players ever in the history of cricket, yet sadly the franchise let him and others down.
This time, they matched his professionalism with how the actual franchise was going. Maybe that’s what mattered.
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The fans of RCB always amaze me. As a cricket writer, you get used to dealing with different fanbases all the time. And most blend into each other, but RCB have always stood out. They are so passionate, almost always broken, and yet never actually fully break. If they all hid in the collective corner, you would understand it, given their history. But they seemed to handle their embarrassment in a different way, publicly.
The only thing they had to hang their collective orange hats on was Virat Kohli. Maybe that was enough. A haunted franchise moving through dystopian seasons is easier when your main player is the main player. So they stuck with their team of suck, no matter what.
In 2024, we saw just what they were made of. Most of those fans were following RCB because of the men’s team. The women’s competition had barely existed at all, and yet none of that seemed to matter.
Fandom is a weird thing; we support people for wearing our favourite matching pyjama uniforms. And so simply by having famous women players in what is still pretty much a pop up league, these fans went all in. And when their new team won, they took to the streets to celebrate.
Of course, some of this is the remarkable rise of women’s cricket, that a franchise team with almost no history at all could be lauded like this. But it also says a lot about RCB fans. Some of the same fans who took to the street to support their women are doing it for the men. This is a group that truly believes in the badge, despite the fact that the badge didn’t always seem to believe in themselves.
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RCB should have already won an IPL by now. I don’t mean that their teams were strong enough, or that they were robbed in certain games. I am also saying that’s not true. I just mean that any team that has played in the IPL since inception – with so few teams in the league, a couple of sides suspended, regular mega auctions and everything else – they should have burgled a trophy.
But the one thing you need for that is luck. And RCB have never had any. If there was a muddy puddle in the desert, they would have stepped in it.
This year, every coin came up RCB.
Phil Salt could have been kept by KKR, but they didn't see him as important. He ends up at RCB, where his pairing with Kohli is nearly perfect. When he couldn’t play, they brought in Jacob Bethell, who has no real T20 pedigree or role definition, and asked him to open. And that worked.
Devdutt Padikkal played exactly as they wanted him to, but he got hurt. So they just went to the shelves and they dusted off an old Mayank Agarwal and made him do it. And that worked.
Suyash Sharma was plucked from KKR’s bench, and was probably intended to be their strike bowling backup spinner. He took eight wickets. But in key moments, he found dot balls and took his victims in clumps. So that worked.
Liam Livingstone couldn’t make runs, so Tim David and Romario Shepherd stood up as the overseas power guys. David was incredible, while Romario played one epic knock and took the most important wicket in the final. Even though Livingstone had a pretty poor season, with David out in the big final, Livingstone still whacked a couple in the most important game. So even when Livingstone didn’t work, that worked.
Remember when Krunal Pandya went up the order to win a game with the bat against Delhi? He tinkered with his bowling to take more wickets. He played one of his greatest seasons. That worked.
Virat Kohli went back to anchoring. It took him forever to find the analysts’ dream version of himself, and this year he geared back because the team needed that. In the final, he got stuck. But in a team full of hitters, they needed a spine to keep it all together. So to win an IPL final, Kohli struck at 122, when the rest of the balls in the match went at 161. And yet, that worked.
RCB had a magical season. Everything worked.
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Josh Hazlewood is a Test bowler. For years, Australia didn’t even use him as much in white ball cricket. He wasn’t a strike option, couldn’t add much with the bat, and so they would often ignore or rest him. And it was quite clear that he felt fine with this as well. It wasn’t like he was going around the world trying to play T20 cricket. He barely played the format – at home, or anywhere else.
Then he decided to give it a real go. Until the year 2020, he’d never even played ten T20s in a calendar year. But he was sure he could work it out, and right now he is a better white ball bowler than either of his Test bowling partners, Mitchell Starc or Pat Cummins. That is wild.
But what is also crazy is that this is no longer a Test side. Their batting is full of specialist hitters. Patidar for spin, David for pace, Shepherd with power, Agarwal with placement. It has a three-tool player in Krunal, and a very decent legspinner in Suyash to back him up. Livingstone as the seventh bowling option who can deliver a bit of everything. Their bowlers are economy demons. And their captain uses them well enough to create wickets too.
This was not just a T20 team, but a modern one. But of course, Hazlewood wasn’t the only Test guy either.
After the match, Kohli talked up Test cricket. He grew up wanting to win World Cups for India and wear their whites. That was his dream. On the way to that, this crazy man and his party whisky team roped him in and built this franchise around him. Along the way, he made so many runs, and none of them seemed to matter. Another year, another failure. Eventually, he gave up the official title of captain.
It was still his franchise, but no longer his team.
But this year, everything finally went right. His team was tested, and they passed. The jokes were on the other teams. Virat Kohli meant business, and for once, so did the franchise that he helped build.
