There is a particular kind of hunger that only arrives after you have finally tasted what you waited eighteen years for. Virat Kohli, 37 years old, winner of every international trophy cricket can offer, walked off the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad in March 2026 as the holder of a Champions Trophy winners’ medal, a T20 World Cup ring — and, sitting quietly in a glass cabinet somewhere in Bengaluru, the IPL trophy that eluded him for nearly two decades.

Irfan Pathan, speaking on JioStar this week, made a simple prediction: “The hunger in Virat Kohli will be there. In fact, he will be hungrier than ever, especially after lifting the IPL trophy last season. He will want to win back-to-back IPL trophies.”

Coming from a former teammate who has watched Kohli operate across formats for fifteen years, this is not a generic pre-season compliment. It is an observation about a specific psychological truth: that for players of Kohli’s competitive architecture, satisfaction is not the emotion that follows winning. More wanting is.

The Numbers That Make This Frightening for Bowlers

The evidence for Pathan’s assessment is not circumstantial. Kohli enters IPL 2026 in the kind of white-ball form that would concern any bowling attack.

In the India vs New Zealand ODI series in January 2026, he was the standout performer of a 2-1 series India lost. His 124 in the third ODI in Indore — his 7th ODI century against New Zealand, a record surpassing Ricky Ponting’s 6 — came on a pitch where India were chasing 337 and his team had slumped to 71 for four around him. He scored 284 runs in three matches in that series, batting against an attack that included new-generation left-armers Zak Foulkes and Kristian Clarke, both of whom were making their names at international level. He handled them with the fluency of a batter twenty years their senior and three formats deeper.

He had already crossed 28,000 international runs in the first ODI of that series against New Zealand in Baroda in early January — a record-breaking milestone on a quiet Thursday afternoon, delivered not with fanfare but with a straight drive through the covers.

In IPL 2025, across 15 matches, he scored 657 runs — the highest by any batter in the tournament, the anchor of RCB’s batting around which Rajat Patidar, Phil Salt, Tim David and Romario Shepherd built the structure that ultimately brought home the title. His 43 in the final against Punjab Kings, on a Mullanpur pitch that was slowing during the afternoon session, was a captain’s contribution even without the captaincy — measured, sensible, keeping the innings together at the top of the order when Salt’s blitz was over.

The Chinnaswamy Question: History, Tragedy and a Conditional Return

There is a shadow over the venue where Kohli’s hunger will be given its first home stage on March 28, and it would be wrong to write about RCB’s IPL 2026 campaign without acknowledging it directly.

On June 4, 2025, hours after RCB beat Punjab Kings in the IPL final to win their first-ever title, a stampede broke out outside the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium as fans thronged the gates for the victory celebration. Eleven people died. The tragedy cast a profound shadow over what should have been the franchise’s greatest night, and the stadium subsequently lost hosting clearances for months.

The road back has been slow, legal and conditional. In January 2026, the Karnataka government granted temporary, conditional permission to KSCA to host IPL and international matches at the Chinnaswamy from March to July 2026, subject to strict safety compliance. The permission came despite the Karnataka High Court not yet granting clearance for the filing of a chargesheet in the case — FIRs have been filed against RCB, KSCA and event management firm DNA Entertainment Network, and a judicial commission has recommended legal action against officials from all three.

Critically, the final decision on whether Chinnaswamy will host IPL 2026 matches — including RCB’s March 28 opener against SRH — rests with an Expert Committee meeting and stadium inspection scheduled for March 13. A full-scale mock demonstration of match-day arrangements is planned. The IPL’s official statement makes clear: “The matches scheduled in Bengaluru are subject to clearance from the Expert Committee.”

If the clearance is granted, the Chinnaswamy will return as a cricket venue with new safety protocols, reduced initial capacity and the weight of eleven lives that serve as a reminder of what cricket’s mass appeal demands in terms of responsibility. If it is not granted, RCB would likely be forced to relocate their home matches to an alternate venue at short notice — a disruption that would affect training patterns, travel schedules and the psychological comfort of a team used to playing in front of their own crowd.

Padikkal’s Return: The Left-Hander Who Grew Into Something More

Pathan’s other major prediction concerns Devdutt Padikkal, and it reflects an observation about long-term player development that is easy to miss amid the noise of star signings.

“Devdutt Padikkal is going to play a major role in RCB’s success in IPL 2026. He has scored runs left, right and centre in domestic cricket across all formats. He looks like a very improved player. There was a time when he was struggling, wasn’t getting his timing right. But that is in the past now. Devdutt Padikkal is a different, very confident player now,” said Pathan.

Padikkal missed the back-end of IPL 2025, including the crucial knockout matches, due to injury. He still managed 247 runs in ten games at a strike rate of 150.60 — reliable, rather than spectacular, but exactly the kind of top-three anchor that RCB need alongside the aggressive partnerships that Salt and Kohli tend to establish in the first six overs. Coming back from injury, playing a full season of domestic cricket through the Ranji Trophy and Vijay Hazare, the 24-year-old left-hander has reportedly worked specifically on his off-side play and conversion rate — two technical gaps that coaches identified in 2024 and that hampered him through the middle stages of IPL 2025.

From Kohli-ABD-Gayle to a Deeper Machine

The most structurally significant point Pathan makes is also the least obvious: that RCB’s improvement is not just about Kohli being hungrier. It is about the franchise having finally transformed from a top-three dependent batting structure into a genuinely balanced XI with match-winners across all eleven positions.

“What I really like about RCB is that earlier they used to rely heavily on Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle to win matches. That has changed now. Their whole playing XI is full of match-winners.”

The comparison lands hard because it is historically accurate: across much of the 2010s, the RCB template was to get Kohli and de Villiers in and trust them to manufacture 200-plus on their own. When both got out cheaply in the same game — which happened regularly — the middle order buckled and matches were lost from positions of 90 for two. The signing of Salt, the development of Tim David and Romario Shepherd as power-hitting units, the emergence of Patidar as an ODI-format captain, and the technical maturation of Padikkal have created a batting lineup in 2026 that can absorb the loss of any single batter and still win from 105 for four with eight overs remaining.

That, ultimately, is the difference between a franchise that wins one trophy — and one that might win two.