Kohli's first-ball duck off Chahar leaves him in back-to-back IPL territory not seen since 2022
Virat Kohli has not put together two ducks in a row in the IPL since 2022. He did it again in Raipur on Sunday, charging at Deepak Chahar's first ball and lobbing a leading edge to Raj Bawa at mid-off. The dismissal makes it consecutive noughts for the RCB talisman, his first such stretch in four years.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru chased down 167 in the last over to dump Mumbai Indians out of IPL 2026 playoff contention, but the win cannot mask how Kohli's IPL run is going right now. He had bagged a two-ball duck against Lucknow Super Giants in the previous match. The Raipur effort lasted one ball.
The shot that gave Bawa the catch
Chahar tossed the new ball up just outside off and Kohli came down the track immediately, looking to clear the in-field over extra cover. The bat angled across the line of the ball and the leading edge ballooned to mid-off, where Bawa took the catch. RCB were 0 for 1 inside the first over of the chase, and Krunal Pandya was forced to rebuild from scratch.
Krunal eventually settled the game with 73 off 46. Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Rasikh Dar saw RCB through on the last ball. None of that softens the headline next to Kohli's name.
Where this sits in his IPL career
It is the 12th IPL duck of Kohli's career and his 8th first-ball dismissal in the tournament. More tellingly, it is only the second time in his IPL career that he has been dismissed for nought in back-to-back appearances. The first stretch came in April 2022, when he fell first ball against Lucknow on 19 April and then repeated the dose four days later against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Brabourne Stadium.
That 2022 sequence sat inside Kohli's worst full IPL campaign, where he finished with 341 runs. The current run does not yet carry that weight. Before the Lucknow nought, Kohli had already crossed 379 runs this season and remained one of RCB's most consistent performers in a year that has otherwise frustrated the franchise.
RCB do not have many games left to settle this
Bengaluru are now on top of the IPL 2026 table after the Raipur win, sitting on 14 points with a net run rate of +1.103, the strongest in the top four. The schedule, though, is unforgiving. Three games left and a strike rate-dependent batter at the top of the order on a two-innings duck streak is the sort of detail that turns into a story very quickly if it stretches into a third match.
Kohli has been a fixture of RCB's batting plan for as long as the IPL has existed. The Raipur dismissal will not change that. The next innings is what everyone in Bengaluru will be watching.
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