RCB take top spot on back of Kohli’s ninth ton

RCB beat KKR by 6 wickets at Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh Stadium, Raipur. Chased 193 with 5 balls left. RCB: 194/4 in 19.1 overs vs KKR: 192/4. RCB moved to top of IPL 2026 with 16 points from 12 games, boosting top-two finish chances. KKR stayed 8th with 9 points, now "on the edge of elimination" After back-to-back ducks in his last two innings, Virat Kohli showed most emphatically that he had merely been out of runs and not out of form, scoring his ninth IPL hundred to lead Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) to the top of the IPL 2026 table with a commanding win over Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in Raipur. 9th IPL hundred – extends his record for most IPL centuries. Jos Buttler is 2nd with 710th T20 hundred overall, 14,000 T20 runs – first Indian to the mark279th IPL match – passed MS Dhoni & Rohit Sharma for most games. Form response: Came in after back-to-back ducks, first run in 3 matches. Pumped his fists after taking single 1st over. Innings: 11 fours, 3 sixes, SR 175. Reached 50 off 32 balls, 100 off 58. RCB's bowlers did a superb job to keep KKR down to below 200 even though they only lost four wickets, and KKR's inexperienced seam attack simply couldn't match them for discipline and ability to extract misbehaviour from a slightly two-paced surface - with the caveat that it may have eased up a little during the second innings. Finish: Kohli reached 100 with single off Arora in 18.2 overs. Celebration “measured” – bat raise, teammates applauded. RCB won with Rajat Patidar 11 and Dinesh Karthik at crease. When the match began - after a rain delay of an hour and a quarter - it became clear that this was a much better pitch to bat on, but there was still something in it for the seamers. Bhuvneshwar showed this with a cross-seamer that nipped away to nick off Finn Allen in the third over, and Hazlewood showed this by getting a short-of-length ball to rear at Ajinkya Rahane and have him caught and bowled off a miscued pull in the fifth over. KKR still scored 56 in their powerplay, though, and 31 of those runs came in two overs from Duffy, who took the new ball ahead of Hazlewood, and didn't do too much that was obviously wrong, but Allen, Rahane and Angkrish Raghuvanshi were good enough to put away marginal errors in line and length. Bottom line: On a night that started with rain and pressure from two ducks, Kohli’s “chase master” 105* reminded everyone his class. RCB controlled the chase and took No. 1, while KKR’s playoff hopes took a major hit. KKR handed a new cap to Saurabh Dubey, the 28-year-old Vidarbha left-arm seamer who had replaced the injured Akash Deep in their squad, brought him on as their Impact Player, and gave him the brand-new ball. And he began with a thrilling first over in which he found seam movement in both directions, beat Jacob Bethell's outside edge three times in the first four balls, and conceded just one run off the bat - a single to get off the mark that Kohli marked with a self-deprecating fist pump. And as the end neared, Kohli grew more expansive, playing two of his most eye-catching shots - a straight six off Anukul Roy with barely any follow-through, and a whipped six of iron wrists off Tyagi - to hurry towards the century mark. He got there with a single off Arora in the 19th over, and Jitesh Sharma finished the game soon after, flat-batting Dubey past long-on to bring up victory with five balls remaining.