RCB Did It Again — and This Time It Wasn’t a Fluke

For eighteen years, supporting Royal Challengers Bengaluru meant learning to live with “next year.” Then last season it finally happened. And now, somehow, it’s happened again.

RCB are back-to-back IPL champions. They beat Gujarat Titans by five wickets in the final at the Narendra Modi Stadium on 31 May to make it two in a row — and if the first title was catharsis, this one is harder to argue with. One trophy can be a hot streak. Two on the bounce is a team that knows what it’s doing.

The number that actually tells the story, though, isn’t the back-to-back. It’s the double: RCB became the first franchise to hold the IPL and the Women’s Premier League titles in the same year. That’s not a highlight reel, that’s an organisation that got its squad-building right across two competitions at once. The “Ee Sala Cup Namde” years — when the phrase was basically a prayer — feel like a different era now.

The season had another headline too, and it wasn’t wearing red. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi finished as the leading run-scorer with 776, a teenager rewriting what we thought a kid could do at this level. If you want a look at the future of Indian batting, you’ve already seen it.

I’ll keep my RCB bias where you can see it — but you don’t have to share it to read this season straight. Two titles and an IPL-and-WPL double isn’t a vibe, it’s a method. The rest of the league has a long winter of homework ahead.

About

Ananya “Vyn” Rao grew up in Bengaluru with two screens always on — cricket on the TV, Valorant on the laptop — and never picked one. She reads both the same way: as momentum and nerves, where one bad decision drags the next one down. A batting collapse and a thrown 13–11 lead, to her, have the same shape.

On the cricket side she covers the IPL, the India men’s and women’s sides across all formats, and the Test cricket that casual coverage skips. On Valorant she’s a serious ranked player who follows the competitive scene properly — the Indian orgs, VALORANT Challengers South Asia, and the road to VCT. Her writing is tactical and narrative: why a collapse happened, what a captain was trying to do, where a match really turned.

She’s an analyst and a fan, not a tipster. Her job is to explain the game.

What she covers

Cricket

IPL tactics and season storylines

Team India — men’s and women’s, across T20Is, ODIs and Tests

Test cricket and the long-format context casual coverage drops

Cricket history, stats and the “wait, that actually happened” oddities

Valorant & esports

The Indian scene — VALORANT Challengers South Asia, the home orgs, the path to VCT Ascension Pacific

The global circuit — VCT, meta shifts, agent and map pools

The player’s-chair view — compositions, clutches and tilt, from someone who’s lived all three

Good to know

RCB through and through — “Ee Sala Cup Namde” finally meant something.

Peaks high-Immortal in Valorant on an initiator main, and will argue util usage with anyone.

Keeps two clocks in her head: IST, and “VCT time” for the graveyard-shift matches.

Watches cricket with a scoring app open and reviews her own Valorant VODs like game film.

Genuinely obsessed with the boring-beautiful numbers — strike rotation, dot-ball pressure, first-blood win rates.