The IPL 2026 season gets underway at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, with defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru hosting Sunrisers Hyderabad in the competition opener.
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Head to Head
RCB enter as defending champions and have the better of this matchup at home, winning five of nine meetings at the Chinnaswamy. SRH hold the overall head-to-head advantage at 14-11 across 26 games, but form and conditions favour the hosts here.
The biggest factor is Pat Cummins. SRH’s regular skipper is unavailable for the early part of the tournament with a back injury, and his absence guts their bowling attack. Ishan Kishan takes the captaincy, but the pace stocks of Jaydev Unadkat, Harshal Patel and Brydon Carse are a significant step down from what SRH would ideally want at a high-scoring venue.
RCB are also without Hazlewood and Yash Dayal, so both attacks have genuine weaknesses. But RCB’s batting firepower is better suited to exploiting those conditions at home. Kohli, Phil Salt, Venkatesh Iyer and Tim David give them the depth to post a total that SRH’s depleted attack will struggle to contain.
RCB won three of the last five clashes between these sides, including a 35-run victory in IPL 2024 when they crossed 200 and SRH folded in the chase. Take the defending champions at home, missing fewer weapons than their opponents.
Best Bet
Kohli was the standout batter in IPL 2025, finishing as the competition’s leading run-scorer with 657 runs at an average of 54.75. He has scored 805 runs against SRH across his IPL career at a strike rate of nearly 142, and at the Chinnaswamy he has accumulated over 3,200 IPL runs including four centuries and more than 20 fifties. Without Cummins to worry about, SRH’s attack is short on the quality to keep him quiet.
Value Bet
Head smashed 374 runs in 12 innings for SRH in IPL 2025 and has been nothing short of brutal at the Chinnaswamy, including that record 100 off 41 balls in 2024 when SRH posted 287. He and Abhishek Sharma aggregated 511 runs together across 12 innings last season, and on a pitch that generally plays well, Head is the most likely SRH batter to go big.
Same Game Multi
RCB H2H / Kohli & Head 20+ Runs / Bhuvneshwar Kumar 1+ Wicket ($4.60)
