RR in IPL 2026: Teen wonder at the wheel

Season at a glance

They started like a runaway train, hit stumbling blocks and then slipped out of the top four. Their campaign could've been derailed by injuries, but Rajasthan Royals picked themselves up with two timely wins to sneak into the Playoffs. Though they knocked Sunrisers Hyderabad out in the Eliminator, their charge was halted by Gujarat Titans in Qualifier 2.

Riyan Parag's first full season in charge was a rollercoaster ride, but one in which the Royals made an impressive start to the post-Sanju Samson era. That said, there was a pattern to their wins. When they won Powerplays with bat and ball, they looked unstoppable. When they were forced to play early catch-up, they seldom caught up, highlighting a team that frontloaded its options and were left reliant on a few names to do their bidding.

Player of the season: Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

Jofra Archer enjoyed a 25-wicket season and yet he wasn't close. The sheer absurdity of Sooryavanshi's numbers is such after all: 776 runs, a strike-rate of 237.31 and a staggering 72 sixes, 13 clear of Chris Gayle's 2012 tally of 59. None of Messrs Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar, Cummins, Rabada or Hazlewood were spared, while he scored a fifty in sixteen balls or under four times to underline one of the great T20 campaigns where he carried the Royals' hopes with the bat. Sheer pace, steep bouncers and slower deliveries - he had an answer to them all. Fittingly, he walked away as the youngest winner of the MVP Award in the league's history.

A stat that adds up:

Through their nine wins in IPL 2026, RR picked up 24 Powerplay wickets at an economy rate of 9.57. The corresponding numbers in seven defeats read 5 wickets and an economy rate of 11.52, reiterating just how dependent they were on Powerplay wickets. Archer accounted for nearly half (14) of the 29 wickets that the Royals picked up in this phase, with little support at the other end once Nandre Burger's early-season burst fizzled out.

A mini-auction pick that...

Looked a million bucks: Yash Raj Punja

With no professional game under his belt, few would've expected the lanky leggie from Karnataka to lead RR's spin attack halfway through the tournament. Except Punja, signed at INR 30 lakh, looked every bit the part with nine wickets at a decent economy rate of 9.30. His height gave him an obvious advantage but his control and ability to mix both the googly and the stock delivery well stood out, as did his composure at a time when RR's campaign threatened to slip away.

Didn't work out: Ravi Bishnoi

The man whose spot Punja took in the XII. With nine wickets from his first four games and the Purple Cap on his head at one stage, Bishnoi enjoyed what was shaping up as a comeback season having been snapped up for INR 7.2 crore. But after a couple of expensive outings, he was left out for the game against PBKS in favour of Punja. He was the seventh bowler used against SRH as he bowled a solitary over, before two expensive ones against GT saw him dropped for good. It remains a bizarre end to what started as a promising season, potentially leaving his future at the franchise in the air on the back of Punja's rise.

Best match of the season: The six-run win over GT in Ahmedabad

As the first team to bat first upon winning the toss in skyexchange cricket 2026, RR justified it with an imposing score of 210. A GT side minus an injured Shubman Gill were bound to struggle and despite Sai Sudharsan's 73, Bishnoi wreaked havoc with a four-fer as GT crumbled from 107/1 to 133/5. Rashid Khan and Kagiso Rabada threatened to snatch the game away from RR, before a four-run 19th over from Archer was followed by a Tushar Deshpande special as he nailed his yorkers to hand the Royals a six-run thriller. The win marked a rare instance of RR managing to find heroes outside Sooryavanshi and Archer in the season.

On a scale of 1-10, 1 being urgent need for introspection and 10, a celebration into the night - IPL 2026 for Rajasthan Royals has been: 7.5

When they were hot, RR looked like the team to beat. The likes of Parag and Yashasvi Jaiswal had underwhelming seasons but there is no denying that they combine to form a solid batting core alongside Sooryavanshi, Dhruv Jurel and Donovan Ferreira. Questions linger over the non-Archer end in the bowling department but if they can fix those holes, RR will be a force to reckon with in 2027.

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