Gill's 84, Sudharsan's 55, Rashid's Four-For — GT Make It Four in a Row at Sawai Mansingh

There are evenings at Sawai Mansingh when the ground sounds like a drum kit being warmed up — short bursts of noise, the brass section of the Royals fans tuning their throats for the chase. Saturday night began that way. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the fifteen-year-old whose every ball is now a small national event, raced to 36 off 16, Dhruv Jurel pillaged 24 off 10, and Rajasthan reached 62 for 2 in five overs chasing 230. The drum kit was loud. The piano had not yet entered.

And then Rashid Khan came on. The piano entered. And the song became a different song entirely. By the time the contest ended, Rajasthan Royals were 152 all out in 16.3 overs, beaten by 77 runs, and Gujarat Titans — a side that two weeks ago looked like a campaign drifting — had stitched together a fourth straight win and walked into second place on the IPL 2026 table. There is a particular kind of cricket that Gujarat play when the wheels turn properly: opening fifties, an unhurried middle, Rashid in the back six, the chase quietly suffocated. On Saturday, with Yashasvi Jaiswal making his captaincy debut and Riyan Parag ruled out, that exact recipe was prepared and served, course by course, in front of a crowd that had come ready to celebrate and went home thinking instead.

Every comfortable Gujarat win in this tournament has begun the same way: at the top. Shubman Gill and Sai Sudharsan walked out, looked at a Sawai Mansingh surface that has been generous all season, and treated the new ball with the casual contempt of two openers in a dressing room that no longer worries about powerplay scores. Gill made 84 off 44, Sudharsan 55 off 36, and the pair added 118 for the opening wicket — their sixth century stand of IPL 2026, a partnership that has quietly become the most reliable opening combination in the tournament. By the time Gill fell, GT were already past 130 and the chase had a shape: take this opening platform, accelerate hard at the back, and bowl Rashid in the middle.

The accelerator at the back was Washington Sundar, whose unbeaten 37 off 20 arrived at exactly the tempo the innings needed, and Rahul Tewatia, whose late hitting added the noise that turns a strong total into an intimidating one. From the position GT had built, 229/4 was perhaps even an under-recovery — but on a surface where 220 had been chased twice this season, it was a target that needed precise bowling rather than a panic. The bowling, of course, was where Rashid Khan reminded everyone why a half-fit Rashid is still the most valuable cricketer in any T20 dressing room he walks into.

Once the early dismissals broke RR's powerplay momentum, Rashid found grip on the surface that the Royals' batters could not read, and the wickets began to fall in a sequence — Jurel first, then a procession through the middle order. Jason Holder, working in tandem from the other end, finished with 3 for 12, the kind of figures that look like a typing error and then turn out to be the actual scoreboard. Between them, Rashid and Holder bowled Rajasthan out from a position where the run rate was eleven an over and the innings looked, very briefly, like a romp.

This was Yashasvi Jaiswal's first match as Rajasthan captain — Riyan Parag ruled out, the armband handed to the 24-year-old left-hander who has been the side's batting axis all season. He won the toss, looked at the pitch, looked at the dew forecast, and chose to chase. It was the orthodox call. The execution was where Saturday went sideways. Sooryavanshi and Jurel gave him exactly the start a captain dreams of in his first game — 62 in five overs, a chase that was three overs ahead of asking — and then both fell, and the middle order discovered that the platform was made of glass.

The hard truth is that Rajasthan's batting line-up, with Parag missing, becomes a top-three plus a hope. Once the openers had given way, there was no figure in the middle order capable of doing what Sundar and Tewatia had done at the other end of the day — taking a strong start and stretching it through the middle overs. Rashid bowled, the wickets fell in clusters, and the innings folded inside seventeen overs. Jaiswal will not look back at his toss call as the wrong one — chasing 230 at this ground is something Jaipur has done before — but he will look at the gap between his top three and his middle order and know that one good evening from him alone will not be enough across the rest of this campaign.

The Sawai Mansingh surface played as it has played all season — a true batting strip that rewards intent in the powerplay, with totals above 220 having been chased twice already this campaign. Gujarat's 229 felt par at the halfway interval, perhaps even slightly below par given how generously the ball was coming on. What changed the contest was not the pitch itself but what the pitch began to offer the spinners as the second innings wore on. The slowness that had been hidden under fresh-ball pace through the GT innings became Rashid's playground in the back ten — turn, drift, the variation in pace that Rajasthan's middle order, set up to attack quick bowling, simply could not adjust to.

The dew arrived as expected through the second innings, but it never became the deciding factor it has been on other recent nights at this ground. The contest had already moved past dew. By the time the moisture mattered, the asking rate had climbed past fifteen and the Rajasthan dressing room was reading body language rather than scorecards.

Rashid Khan's IPL 2026 has been a quieter season than his previous ones. The wickets have come in spurts rather than storms, the economy figures less terrifying than they used to be, the conversation around him drifting towards questions about workload and age. Saturday was the answer to all of it. Four overs. Four wickets for 36. The dismissal of Jurel set the tone — a googly that the right-hander never picked, gone playing across the line — and the spell that followed dismantled a batting order that had walked in believing this was a chasing surface and walked out understanding what Rashid does to surfaces when he gets grip.

The remarkable thing about Rashid's bowling, even now in his thirties, is the absence of theatre. He does not appeal long. He does not glare at batters. He bowls, the ball does what he wants it to do, and the stumps or the pad or the outside edge does the rest. Saturday's spell was a reminder that match-winning spin in T20 cricket is not about exotic variation or spectacular release points — it is about doing one thing extraordinarily well, ball after ball, until the batter on the other end runs out of ways to disagree with you. Rashid did exactly that. The Player of the Match award was a formality.

Our pre-match write-up on this contest was deliberately neutral. We did not lean towards either side, and we noted that Sawai Mansingh's batting-friendly surface meant the contest would likely be decided by which team adapted better through the middle overs. That bit, at least, we got right — the middle overs, with Rashid and Holder doing the bulk of the damage, were precisely where the night turned. We did not call out specific players to watch in the preview, so there is no individual prediction to mark on either side. What we will own is that the preview undersold the gap between these two squads in their current shapes — Gujarat are a sharper team than the table suggested at the start of the day, and Saturday's win earns them a place near the top of our forward-looking power rankings.

For Gujarat Titans, four wins on the trot and second place on the table changes the conversation from "still in the race" to "playing for top two." Their next assignment — SRH on May 12 — is a heavyweight contest, both sides level on points, both sides hunting the same finishing position, and a result there could decide the geometry of the playoff bracket. The opening pair is purring, the middle is finding tempo, and Rashid has just reminded the league that vintage Rashid still exists. Rahul Tewatia's late hitting and Sundar's calm at the back have given this team a death-overs blueprint that did not exist three weeks ago. For Rajasthan Royals, the maths is harder. Parag's absence will hurt for as long as it lasts, and Jaiswal's captaincy will be tested in a stretch of fixtures where the side will need to replace not just runs but presence. The next match is the one that defines whether this campaign retains hope or begins its formal goodbye.