Follow UsAround 11.45 AM, there was a bit of murmur at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium about who was going to captain Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025. But the real question was how they were going to announce to their faithful that Virat Kohli wasn’t going to captain the side.
That’s really what the room wanted to know. In just a few minutes after the event started, it was clear that RCB were going to pass the baton on to a younger and fresher leader, Rajat Patidar, if it wasn’t as obvious when they played the audio/visual of RCB’s captains over the generations.
A few minutes later, he was in his shiny new glittering jacket as RCB’s new captain, seated right between two decision-makers (RCB’s head coach, Andy Flower and RCB’s Director of Cricket, Mo Bobat). Patidar didn’t break a sweat and you knew that he belonged here, almost too comfortable in that shiny blazer.
For someone who wasn’t even in the franchise’s initial plans, this isn’t just another story, it is a story of grit and determination. It is, more importantly, a story of an individual taking fate into his own hands and owning the pressure. If the first two didn’t get him the captaincy mantle, the third one all but sealed that debate.
"Watching Rajat and how he captained and played for MP [Madhya Pradesh, in the domestic circuit] was encouraging. We took inputs from Virat. There was compelling evidence that Rajat was a viable option,” Mo Bobat said at the event.
But the seed was sown almost a year ago during IPL 2024 when the management approached the Madhya Pradesh batter about the ‘possibility’ of leading RCB in the future. Patidar was ready, but proving it was the way to seal all debates—as he did leading Madhya Pradesh to the final of the 2024/25 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.
“Mo [Bobat] asked me, are you interested in doing captaincy? So I told him that before doing the captaincy of RCB, I'd like to have a captaincy of a state team [MP],” Patidar revealed.
Not once during the high-profile domestic tournament was Patidar’s batting affected by the pressure of captaincy. Across nine innings, the MP captain amassed 428 runs while still striking at 186.1. Moreso, for brand RCB, the chants for Patidar ringing around the Colosseum at the Chinnaswamy Stadium were enough.
“The first one is that Rajat has a calmness and simplicity that I think will really help him as a leader and a captain, particularly in the IPL,” RCB head coach Flower praised Patidar’s captaincy.
“As we know, the IPL is one of the premier competitions in the world and there's pressures involved in that. And the calm, simple demeanour that inherently lives within Rajat is going to serve him really well in the hurly-burly of that tournament. And his decision-making will be tested like all of ours is, but these qualities will stand him in really good stead,” he added.
There couldn’t have been a better time for the franchise to start fresh.
Kohli is 36 and has probably only one full IPL cycle left in him. The franchise was heading in a direction quite unknown to the fans, almost opposite to Kohli’s fiery nature on the field. It wasn’t that they didn’t have options. They had Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Krunal Pandya and Josh Hazlewood, but none were in the direction of a long haul.
In Patidar, they have someone carrying on Faf du Plessis’ legacy of having ice in his veins.
“If I talk about my way of captaincy, it's important to back my players. So yeah, I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by one of the best people. We have a group of leaders as well, where experience and ideas will definitely help in my new leadership role, and both as an individual also,” Patidar said.
After all, Patidar, over the last three years, even went the distance of postponing his marriage to be part of RCB’s setup for the 2022 season. The rest, indeed, was history, as he went on to script a memorable century against Lucknow Super Giants in the Eliminator, earning the trust of the fans.
Since then, he’s been one of the mainstays of the RCB batting unit, and has considerably even been endorsed by Kohli as their new skipper.
"This is very well deserved, the entire team is behind you, and you'll have all our support. I've done it for many years, Faf has done it for many years, and you've earned the right to be in this position. I'm sure you'll grow from strength to strength," Kohli said during the announcement.
Poetically, for Patidar, it was written in the stars.
Hosa Adhyaya Naya Raj(at) Patidar.