Klaasen, Gill, Kohli, Klaasen again: the IPL 2026 Orange Cap has changed hands three times in a week
The Orange Cap has changed hands three times in a week. Heinrich Klaasen took it, Virat Kohli claimed it with a 49 off 34 against Lucknow Super Giants on April 15, Shubman Gill went past him two nights later, and Klaasen snatched it back with a 59 off 39 in SRH’s 10-run win over Chennai Super Kings. For a race that normally settles around one or two names by mid-April, this is an unusual level of traffic at the top.
Klaasen now leads with 283 runs from six matches. Gill is on 251 from two fewer innings. Kohli sits third on 247, with his captain Rajat Patidar fourth on 230. Four players are within 53 runs of each other, and none of them has a settled share of the lead.
Kohli’s Impact Player moment
The RCB forward’s contribution to that tangle came in the strangest circumstances of his IPL career. Kohli picked up an ankle knock in the Mumbai Indians match on April 12, had been sore in the knee for longer than that, and had been under the weather for most of the week before the Lucknow game. When Patidar won the toss at the Chinnaswamy and chose to bowl, Kohli was left out of the starting XI and named as the Impact Player instead.
It was the first time RCB have ever used him in that role, and the first time in his IPL career he has batted as a designated substitute. The 49 was clean, six fours and a six, a strike rate of 144.11 across 34 balls in a chase of 147. He told broadcasters afterwards he was still not back to 100 per cent but was pleased he had found the early intensity the team needed. Patidar finished it off, RCB won by five wickets with 29 balls to spare, and Kohli topped the Orange Cap list for roughly two days.
Gill and Klaasen keep overtaking
Gujarat’s captain has been the story of the past week. Gill struck an 86 against KKR in Ahmedabad on Friday to move past Kohli, 251 runs in four innings at a strike rate of 154.94, and his form has been at the centre of GT’s climb up the table. Klaasen’s 59 off 39 against CSK the next night tipped the numbers back the other way. He has carried Sunrisers through a handful of tricky chases and is now the first batter to move past 280 in the tournament.
Anshul Kamboj holds the Purple Cap for Chennai Super Kings at the other end of the leaderboard, and the density at the top of the Orange Cap race partly reflects the quality of bowling this season. No team has blown the competition away with a run of 200-plus totals, and that has kept the gap between the leading batters tight.
What RCB still have to solve
For RCB, the Orange Cap swing matters less than what it says about how they are managing Kohli. A day after the LSG match he was back in the XI against Delhi Capitals, and the team clearly have an option they did not previously trust themselves to use. The Impact Player rule has never been especially kind to top-order batters in general, but a full innings in the middle overs rather than 20 overs in the outfield suits a player in his late thirties who is playing with a knock.
The wider issue is the bowling. RCB have been good enough to chase 147 at the Chinnaswamy and bad enough to let sides past 200 on the road, and the schedule does not get any friendlier from here. Kohli finding a way to keep producing on reduced physical capacity is half of the job. Finding someone to close out the middle overs with the ball, when Bhuvneshwar Kumar is rested or the surface is flat, is the other half.
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