Nine years on, Bhuvneshwar Kumar is leading the Purple Cap again
Bhuvneshwar Kumar's three for 28 in Ahmedabad on Thursday night did two things at once. It pulled him into outright lead of the IPL 2026 Purple Cap race with 17 wickets, two clear of Sunrisers Hyderabad's Eshan Malinga, and it nudged him to 350 wickets in T20 cricket, the first Indian fast bowler to reach the mark and only the second Indian after Yuzvendra Chahal.
The figures were not the headline result. RCB lost the game by four wickets and the post-match column inches went, fairly, to Arshad Khan and Jason Holder. But the longer story sitting under the scorecard is that the bowler at the top of the wicket-takers' table is 36 and is doing this nine years after his last Purple Cap.
A second wave that almost no one expected
Bhuvneshwar Kumar last led the Purple Cap standings outright in 2017, when he took 26 wickets for Sunrisers Hyderabad and won the cap for the second straight season. He remains the only bowler in IPL history to win the Purple Cap in back-to-back years. After that, his IPL career did the usual things a senior fast bowler's career does: a few good seasons, a few injury-affected ones, a quiet stretch around the early 2020s, and a release by SRH ahead of the 2024 mega auction.
The 2025 RCB chapter was the first reset. He was bought for ₹10.75 crore, slotted in as the new-ball lead, and finished the season with 17 wickets as RCB lifted their first IPL title at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Useful, but not the headline of that title run; that belonged to Virat Kohli's 602 runs and Josh Hazlewood's 22 wickets.
2026 has flipped the order. With nine matches gone, Bhuvneshwar's average of 15.52 is the kind of number a death-overs specialist tends not to post, and five three-wicket hauls in nine games is a hit rate most senior pacers do not produce. He is not just hanging on at 36. He is the most productive bowler in the tournament.
What's actually changed
The eye test answers part of the question. The Bhuvneshwar of 2017 was a swing-with-the-new-ball seamer whose value sat almost entirely in the powerplay. The Bhuvneshwar of 2026 is a more rounded bowler. He still takes the new ball, but a lot of his work this season has come at the death, where his control of length and his slower-ball variations have been doing more damage than late swing.
The role suits the modern IPL, where powerplay totals have ballooned and the captains who win games are the ones who can afford to hold a wicket-taking option for the back end. RCB have been able to use Bhuvneshwar across all three phases without giving him the kind of one-dimensional brief that wears a 36-year-old body out by mid-season.
The other half of the answer is workload management. He has not played a Test in years, the last full white-ball international tour is some way back, and the IPL is now the centre of his calendar rather than a stop on the way to or from a series. A pacer who comes into the IPL fresh, and only has to peak for the IPL, is a different animal from a pacer trying to manage three formats and a national-team role at the same time.
A complicated record at the top
The Purple Cap leaderboard always tells you something about the season's character. A spinner on top usually means a slow-season, low-scoring tournament. An overseas seamer at the top usually means a few teams have gambled correctly on conditions. An old-school Indian swing bowler at the top, in a high-scoring season, says something else.
It says that some of the basics still work. New-ball discipline, off-cutters at the death, knowing where your stock ball is, knowing when to walk back rather than fire in the yorker. Bhuvneshwar has been doing all of those things for a decade and a half, and he is one of the few bowlers in the league who has the physical economy not to need help from the ball or the pitch.
RCB will not be reading too much into Thursday's defeat in Ahmedabad. They lost a winnable game on the back of a poor batting effort, not because their attack let them down. Bhuvneshwar's role in their title defence is becoming the most reliable thing in their season, and if he keeps this up across the closing matches there is a credible second Purple Cap waiting at the end of it. Nine years on. The least likely comeback story of the IPL summer.
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