Last year, when the Royal Challengers Bengaluru finally won their maiden IPL final, they did so by beating another trophyless team in the competition, the Punjab Kings. A franchise that has persevered in the league for equally long, without the expectation that sooner or later, they would join the ranks of trophy winners. No slogans of ‘this year the cup will be ours’ for them.
And they came quite close to making it another saga of heartbreak for their opponents. It was 29 to get off six balls, with Josh Hazlewood bowling. Who knows what crazy outcome we could have had on our hands had even one of the first two balls not been a dot. Because Shashank Singh, the hard-hitting middle-order batter, took 22 off the next four.
For Ricky Ponting, their Australian coach, the shock of that what-if from one of the most nerve-wracking IPL finals is a thing of the past now. “Last year worked out really well for us, making it through to the final. And this season, it’s been so far so good. We’ve got off to a good start. A lot of our younger players are obviously 12 months more experienced than they were last year. And it’s starting to show in the way they play their cricket,” Ponting tells me on a Zoom call from Chandigarh.
In sport, as in life, number twos rarely count. The stoicism of it all aside, the prospect of coming back and rolling the boulder up the hill after coming so near and yet so far, must be surely daunting? He must have felt the need to do things differently.
“It’s funny that you use the word ‘differently’ because we had a really good last year and a great auction. I was able to put a group of players together that I thought could be different, and to actually change the way that this franchise has played and been looked at over a long period of time. So, when I turned up this year, it was all about finding ways to be different again, and not playing the same way that we did last year because, as it turned out, that wasn’t quite good enough,” he says, eventually conceding that things do have to be different.
That’s brave, though. Because the natural progression after doing really well once in a competition except for that one final time, is to continue sticking to what worked for you in the immediate past. Finding a new way that works is a whole new process, but if you are willing to take that route, it signals confidence. You’re in the big league now.
“It was surely disappointing for us last year, having worked as hard as we did, finishing on top of the table and making it to the final with a brand-new team. Getting so close and not quite there was a bitter pill to swallow. But at the end of the day, those near-misses have got to make you better. They’ve got to make you stronger, to make you bounce back and want things even more,” Ponting says.
In the 2025 final—though it could be a harsh assessment now—Punjab probably let the game get away from them in the middle overs. They lost wickets in the middle overs after having an almost-stable start. In the end, even the final-over flourish from Singh proved too little, too late. And so, in 2026, the how may have needed a bit of an overhaul, but the what remains pretty much the same for Ponting and Punjab.
“We’ve kept a really similar group of players together this year. In the auction, we only picked up three players. And that’s been a big part of my strategy—just to keep a group of players together, one that I know are good enough to win but also to be able to continue working on the cultural side and the atmosphere around our team and franchise.”
In the IPL, Ponting, who was once a world-dominating Aussie captain and scourge of opposition fans all over the world, has continued his legacy of confident, tactically bold leadership as coach. Under him, the Mumbai Indians won the title in 2015. He coached the Delhi franchise for seven seasons, through their rebranding and rebuilding, grooming young players such as Rishabh Pant, Shreyas Iyer and Sanju Samson. Delhi Capitals had three great back-to-back seasons (2019-21) with him. And then he came to Punjab, where in his first season, he took the franchise within striking distance at a title they still don’t count as favourites for. You wonder whether this man has the answer to what franchises that win multiple titles do differently from those that come close to winning.
“Look, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think I do. If you look back through the history of the IPL, the teams with the best continuity are the teams that have won the title. Great leadership plays a big part in winning games,” he says.
Which was why he pushed as hard as he could to make sure he got Shreyas Iyer in the auction.
“He is, obviously, someone I’ve worked with a lot for a number of years at Delhi and have had a great working relationship with for a long time. And I think we both have very similar views on the game, and very similar values, on what makes a really strong team.”
During games, too, Iyer and Ponting rarely differ. “We’re happy to back each other. We have some good, honest conversations about all sorts of things—the way we train, plan and prepare, and about team selection,” he tells me.
What he means isn’t that there is no healthy disagreement or brainstorming happening at the HQ. It’s just that captain and coach are truly in sync with each other, both men really the kind to not let any noise get to them. We’ve seen it with Ponting and we’re seeing it with Iyer. For all the conversation around the Aussie great’s similarity with Virat Kohli—their in-your-face bluntness and on-field hostility as leader has been talked about a lot—it is Iyer who is his true protégé and mirror image in a way. Much like Ponting, the India batter doesn’t seem consumed by the pursuit of correctness.
And then, if one of them’s got a bit of a gut feel on a play or a bit of an instinct about something that might happen during a game, “then we’re both pretty happy just to trust each other and see how it plays out. So far in the tournament, that’s been really good, and it’s been good through the five or six years that we’ve worked together.”
Ponting truly believes in playing the long game. He isn’t afraid of doing the work over and over, building it up so that the momentum breaks the door down on its own. It is something that, he has frequently noticed, champion teams have traditionally done in the tournament.
“If you look at Mumbai or Chennai or Kolkata, those sides have had the longest sustained runs of success in the IPL. And that’s what we want to achieve here at Punjab. It’s not about having one good season last year—it’s about having sustained success and getting better day on day and year on year. And hopefully be able to win some titles. I talked about continuity—that’s one of the reasons that we stuck with a group of players that we had from last year,” he says.
After four games, Punjab are without a loss. They chased 219 down in their last game without breaking a sweat. Besides skipper Iyer, who finished the match in just the self-assured style we’ve seen evolve in his manner, the Kings were helped massively by the opening pair of Prabhsimran Singh and Priyansh Arya. While Arya, whose impressive exploits have been overshadowed a bit by the freakish brilliance of teen prodigy Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Singh played a classy hand for his 51 (25).
“Their partnership at the top developing and getting better every game, every training day that we have… little things like those make my job that little bit easier. They add up and play a big part where your team’s success comes.”
And nothing else could sum those little things up better than the other day when, against the Sunrisers Hyderabad, with the IPL’s heaviest-scoring team, lurched forward to break one of their own ridiculous records. By the eighth over, they had put 120 on the board and nine sixes had been hit. Then Shashank Singh came dibbly-dobblying in and removed SRH’s Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield—Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head. The fireworks stalled, the show dulled down, and Punjab’s batting did the rest.
“We’ve already seen the impact of this group in the tournament. Priyansh, Prabhsimran, Cooper (Connolly)—who has dominated the first couple of games he’s played. The other night, we saw what Xavier Bartlett can do with the new ball. Someone like Marco Jansen has had a pretty incredible 12 months in all formats of the game,” Ponting rattles off with trademark unaffectedness.
The other thing that the Punjab Kings coach stresses on is quality backup—he mentions Harpreet Brar “sitting on the sidelines despite having his best domestic season last year”, and Lockie Ferguson expected to be back into the setup soon. Also, in guys like Marcus Stoinis, Xavier Bartlett, Ben Dwarshuis, Mitch Owen and Cooper Connolly, Ponting’s Punjab have a core of skilful T20 specialists back home from Australia. And even though he says this wasn’t by design, he did want a few Australians last year.
“You’d recall I talked about trying to create a culture and through history, Australian cricketers culturally have been very strong around teams. So, it was not necessarily my plan, but just trying to have the right people in the right place at the right time, which, I believe, is big for sustained success. It was all about putting together a squad that would fit well and play well together.”
And that, Punjab seem to have done. Now all that they need is another final.