The IPL 2026 season is starting on March 28 and in the first match, defending champion Royal Challengers Bangalore is going to face Sunrisers Hyderabad. After 9 years, both the teams will play the first match of an IPL season. The battle for the trophy for this season will begin with this match at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. While there will be a competition for the title between 10 teams, there will also be a race among some players to surpass each other and it will start between Virat Kohli and Abhishek Sharma in the first match itself.

The first match of this season will be played between RCB and SRH in Bengaluru. Both the teams will be without some of their important players but still both of them will be full of star players. Especially in batting, RCB and SRH will compete equally with each other. In this, most eyes will be on the openers of both the teams. Where the most successful batsman of the league for RCB Virat Kohli While presenting his claim, young opener Abhishek Sharma will take charge for SRH.

Which race between Kohli-Abhishek?

Their teams will have high expectations from Kohli and Abhishek but these two stars of Indian cricket will compete with each other in a special race. This is the race for most centuries in T20 cricket. Kohli still holds the record for most T20 centuries for India. The veteran Indian batsman has scored 9 centuries in 414 T20 matches and thus is the number-1 Indian batsman. If he scores a century against Sunrisers, he will become the first Indian and fourth batsman overall to reach 10 T20 centuries.

In this matter he is facing tough competition from Abhishek Sharma. Abhishek, the most explosive batsman of the current Indian team, is not far behind Kohli in terms of centuries. The left-handed opener has scored 8 centuries in only 181 matches and is at second position. Now if he scores a century in the match against RCB and Kohli fails, then both will have 9 centuries each. In this way, Abhishek will become number-1 because he will do this feat in less matches than Kohli.

These stalwarts also join the race

If both fail then this race will continue in the upcoming matches. Apart from these two, former captain of Team India and star opener of Mumbai Indians Rohit Sharma is also included in this race. He has 8 centuries in his name in 463 matches, while Ishan Kishan and KL Rahul have 7-7 T20 centuries. Now who among them leaves Kohli behind or Virat succeeds in maintaining his dominance, it will become clear in the next 2 months.