For five games in a row, Mohammed Siraj and Kagiso Rabada have bowled through the powerplay for Gujarat Titans (GT). That's a first in the IPL.
GT have won all five games.
This is, first of all, a testament to how relentless the two new-ball bowlers have been with their lengths, and how good they have been at extracting every ounce of help from the surfaces they've played on. Both have been in exceptional rhythm too. Siraj has occasionally hit speeds in the mid-140s (kph), and Rabada has frequently entered the 150s.
They and GT's other fast bowlers have, however, also had a helping hand from the pitches they've played on.
This five-match sequence began in Chennai, where GT bowled first on a pitch that Jason Holder - who went for just 22 in his four overs - summed up as having "a lot of moisture, and steep bounce up front".
And GT have played three of the other four matches at their home ground in Ahmedabad. At this point in IPL 2026, it is the ground with the best fast-bowling average (21.35) in the league, of all venues that have hosted at least three games. It is one of only two grounds - Lucknow is the other - where fast bowlers have gone at less than nine an over.
On Tuesday night, Ahmedabad served up one of the most seam-friendly pitches of the season. GT seldom went beyond third gear in getting to 168, but it was clear all along that Sunrisers Hyderabad's (SRH) fast bowlers were extracting unusual amounts of seam movement as well as grip when they bowled cutters. B Sai Sudharsan's 44-ball 61 and Washington Sundar's 33-ball 50 may have seemed unusually old-school to the viewer, but both innings were just right for the surface.
And they were just right for the bowlers GT would unleash once they had a total to defend.
If you were given Tuesday's pitch and asked to assemble the best possible attack to exploit it, you might choose one that looked like GT's. The swing, seam and accuracy of Siraj, the pace, bounce and seam movement of Rabada, the height and bounce of Holder, and the height and hard lengths of Prasidh Krishna, plus arguably the world's best wristspinner in Rashid Khan if you need a bit of spin. GT only needed five balls of spin, bowling SRH out for 86 in just 14.5 overs.
Because of how team-building works in the IPL, with every team starting out with the same purse and with only a handful of players retained between seasons, it's difficult for teams to tick every box. Most teams will look to be exceptional in some areas, hold their own in some others, and be willing to live with one or two obvious weaknesses.
GT are particularly clear-headed in this regard. They've assembled the best bowling attack in the IPL, and the most solid top order. On their best days, the bowlers and top order do all the heavy lifting and leave the middle order with barely anything to do.
For a team like this, conditions can matter quite a bit. On flat surfaces, where good lengths take as much of a pounding as any other lengths, and where it helps to have a batting line-up with depth and a high six-hitting ceiling, the gap between GT's bowling attack and other attacks becomes less significant, and the weaknesses in GT's batting become more of an issue.
On pitches like Tuesday's, however, GT become extremely hard to beat. SRH brought one of the best top threes in IPL history to Ahmedabad, in Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan, and watched them struggle to put bat to ball. Siraj and Rabada extracted far too much movement and bounce from good lengths, and kept hitting those lengths far too often, for full-on T20-style powerplay batting to work. SRH's target of 169 began to look monumental almost as soon as their chase commenced.
As in other formats, there are no good or bad pitches in T20 - the only bad ones are those from which the ball lifts dangerously from a length. And given that the BCCI has taken a greater degree of control in IPL pitch preparation than before, the seam-friendliness of Ahmedabad's pitches may be entirely coincidental. Some teams, in fact, have expressed their frustration or helplessness at a lack of control over pitch preparation, with Delhi Capitals head coach Hemang Badani asking for consistency from the BCCI's curators after getting wildly contrasting pitches for two home games within the space of three days.
For GT, however, their team construction has dovetailed beautifully with their home pitches, in a manner that harks back to the days of Chennai Super Kings' foolproof spin-to-win strategy at Chepauk. GT's team management may not have any say in the pitches they've been getting this season, but they certainly won't be complaining.