IPL 2026's first week has been pure chaos and every team should be worried
Let's start with the trend that nobody expected. Five of the first six matches have been won by the team batting second. In a format where conditions, toss luck and dew all play their part, an 83 percent chase record across the first round of fixtures is unusual. Some of those chases were comfortable. Some were not. But the pattern is clear enough to make every captain think twice about batting first after winning the toss.
The kids are alright
If this first week belonged to anyone, it belonged to the teenagers and the debutants. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, all of 15 years old, smashed a 15-ball fifty for Rajasthan Royals in their demolition of Chennai Super Kings. Cooper Connolly, playing his first IPL innings for Punjab Kings, scored an unbeaten 72 off 44 balls to steer a calm chase against Gujarat Titans. Sameer Rizvi dug Delhi Capitals out of 26 for 4 with a composed 70.
These are not cameos. These are match-defining performances from players who were not supposed to be the headline acts. The IPL has always been a stage for young talent, but this opening week felt different. The established names, Kohli aside, spent most of the week catching up to what the newcomers were doing.
Injury chaos and selection headaches
Then there is the injury list, which reads like a squad announcement in reverse. MS Dhoni is out with a calf strain. Pat Cummins is nursing a back injury. Josh Hazlewood has hamstring and Achilles problems. Mitchell Starc is being managed. Harshit Rana's season is over before it started, and Sam Curran and Nathan Ellis will not play at all this year. Add Dewald Brevis, Wanindu Hasaranga, Lockie Ferguson and Matthew Short to the list and you start to understand why no team has been able to name its best side.
KKR have lost both their opening matches and their fast bowling stocks are in crisis. CSK have been bowled over in their only game so far and do not know when Dhoni will return. SRH have the runs but keep losing wickets in clusters through the middle overs. Even the defending champions, RCB, needed Kohli's 69 off 38 to get over the line in the opener against SRH, and they are still without Hazlewood.
Controversy is never far away
The umpiring debates started on night one with the Klaasen boundary catch in the RCB-SRH opener, continued with Abhishek Sharma's disputed dismissal against KKR, and then expanded beyond the pitch entirely when Sanjiv Goenka's animated post-match conversation with Rishabh Pant went viral. LSG released what they called an "unfiltered" clip of the exchange to calm things down, but nobody was buying it.
All of this happened in the first six matches. There are 68 more to go. If the opening week is any guide, IPL 2026 is going to be the messiest season in years. Good messy, mostly. The kind of messy where form guides are useless and young players nobody has heard of keep stealing games. But also the kind where teams cannot stop tripping over their own squad planning, and where the gap between the best and worst on any given night feels impossibly thin.
Nobody has a clue who is winning this thing. That is exactly how the IPL should feel.
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