Bengaluru, as the home of defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), would have hosted the final of IPL 2026 had it not been for what the BCCI termed "certain requirements from the local association and authorities that were beyond the BCCI's established guidelines and protocols".
So the final went to Ahmedabad, and we ended up with the unusual scenario of RCB - the defending champions, table-toppers and winners of Qualifier 1 - playing as the nominal home team at a venue that definitely wasn't their home. Gujarat Titans (GT), who call Ahmedabad home on every other day of the year, were the away team.
This was a piquant situation in and of itself, and particularly so in the context of this season, during which GT had turned Ahmedabad into one of the few remaining home fortresses in the IPL. They had built a squad perfectly suited to the venue, and its pitches, over the course of the tournament, had also seemed to change to better suit them, providing increasing amounts of help for the fast bowlers.
It isn't often that a team comes into an IPL final with this degree of home advantage - especially not when they aren't technically the home team. Unfortunately for GT, they were facing the one team in the league that could turn their home advantage against them.
Josh Hazlewood came into this final on the back of what had been an ordinary season by his standards. But if there was one venue in India that could spark him back to life, it was this one.
Right through IPL 2026, Ahmedabad has been the best venue in the tournament for fast bowlers to bowl Hazlewood lengths: short of good length and short. If bowling those lengths has been fraught with danger at other venues - they have gone for more than 11 an over in Jaipur, New Chandigarh and Mumbai, while bringing wickets at 45-plus averages - it has been a fruitful enterprise in Ahmedabad. The square here has pitches of every soil type, and even the black-soil pitches have provided plenty of bounce.
Sunday's final was played on Pitch No. 6, a mixed-soil surface, and it took Hazlewood only two balls to demonstrate how much he could get out of it.
Shubman Gill loves batting in Ahmedabad. Nearly a fourth of all his T20 runs have come at this venue, at an average of 52.06 and a strike rate of 165.2. Wake him up at 3am, put him in the middle with a bat in hand, and the chances are that he will still middle everything you bowl. Particularly if you bowl anything he can pull or play his favourite short-arm jab against.
But things become a little more complicated when Hazlewood is bowling, and getting the ball to climb in that cartoonishly vertical way. Gill brought out the short-arm jab almost by instinct, and was in no position to adjust for the extra bounce. The bat turned in his hands so its face was pointing up, and he sliced the ball high in the air, roughly in the direction of a very straight mid-on. Rajat Patidar sprinted all the way from mid-off to complete an excellent catch. GT were 22 for 1 in 2.2 overs.
If bowling hard lengths into the pitch is Hazlewood's natural mode of operation, it's not necessarily the first thing you associate Bhuvneshwar Kumar with. He isn't a physically imposing bowler like Hazlewood, and bounce isn't one of his primary weapons. But even he knows how to exploit it when it's available.
B Sai Sudharsan likes taking on bounce as a batter. He is particularly good square of the wicket on the off side, and capable of getting on top of the bounce to cut. In Qualifier 2 in New Chandigarh, he had begun GT's chase of 215 with a quite extraordinary shot off Jofra Archer, a jumping uppercut over backward point.
In the fourth over of the final, Sai Sudharsan attempted a similar shot off Bhuvneshwar, but this ball - a proper bouncer, banged in halfway down the pitch - simply kept climbing, giving the batter no chance to ride the bounce. All he managed was a top edge, and wicketkeeper Jitesh Sharma completed a running catch where short fine leg might have been stationed.
GT had lost both openers inside four overs. This was only the fourth time this season that both Gill and Sai Sudharsan had fallen inside the powerplay. It was the third time it had happened against RCB.
For a bowling team, it's always a good thing to dismiss both openers inside the powerplay. It's an especially good thing against GT, who are extraordinarily reliant on Gill and Sai Sudharsan (and to a lesser extent, this season, on Jos Buttler) to do their heavy lifting with the bat.
To have dismissed both openers just 3.4 overs into the final was a major coup for RCB. It was, more or less, half the battle won.
And those two wickets were the most desirable outcomes of a process that RCB's fast bowlers stuck to right through GT's innings. They bowled 57 short or short-of-good-length balls over the course of the innings, the joint sixth-most such deliveries in any innings this season. Three of those top seven innings, incidentally and revealingly, have come in Ahmedabad.
RCB's was a bowling attack that quickly sussed out - after one over of full, swing-seeking balls from Jacob Duffy - that into-the-pitch was the way to go on this surface, and executed that plan brilliantly. Over the course of this season, it has typically been GT exploiting the seam movement and bounce of Ahmedabad's pitches with their carefully assembled Test-match fast-bowling trio of Mohammed Siraj, Kagiso Rabada and Jason Holder. Few teams have been able to match GT in this department.
RCB, however, have a pace attack that is every bit as good as GT's. On the biggest day of the season, they outbowled GT in their backyard. Perhaps, RCB were the home team after all.