Here is a thought that will either make you laugh or make you deeply uncomfortable depending on how seriously you take IPL patterns.

Mumbai Indians last won an opening game in 2012. They beat Chennai Super Kings by eight wickets at Chepauk and it was the last time the most successful franchise in IPL history started a season with a win.

The following year something happened.

MI scouting team signed a 19-year-old from Gujarat with an unconventional stuttering run-up and vicious death-over yorkers whose name was Jasprit Bumrah. He played his first IPL game on April 4, 2013. MI lost that game. And every opening game since. For thirteen consecutive seasons

Now. Is Jasprit Bumrah responsible for MI’s opening game curse?

No. Obviously not. That would be absurd. He is the best bowler in the world and one of the greatest cricketers India has produced. But the timing is so precise and so unrelenting that even writing it down feels like something that needs to be addressed rather than ignored. So let us address it properly.

The last opening game win for MI and what came before Jasprit Bumrah

Before 2013 MI were not cursed at all. They won their opening game in 2012 against CSK at Chepauk by eight wickets. Clean. Dominant.

The kind of win that suggested a team absolutely ready for a season. Before that they had their moments in openers across the previous four years, some wins, some losses, nothing that suggested a pattern. They were a normal franchise with a normal distribution of opening results.

Then John Wright went to an Ahmedabad domestic T20 game looking at a different player entirely and ended up watching a 19-year-old bowl twelve yorkers in the death overs of a Gujarat vs Mumbai match.

Wright called Parthiv Patel who said two words. That’s Boom. Wright called the MI scouting team immediately. MI signed Bumrah for the 2013 season. And on April 4, 2013 Bumrah played his first IPL game against RCB at Bengaluru. MI lost by two runs. The curse had begun.

Thirteen seasons and thirteen opening defeats for Mumbai Indians

The record is not just a losing streak. It is a specific kind of losing streak that feels designed to cause maximum psychological damage to an MI fan. They lost by two runs in 2013.

By one wicket in 2018 when Dwayne Bravo smashed 20 off the penultimate over bowled by Jasprit Bumrah before Kedar Jadhav sealed it with a six and a four. By six runs in 2024 in Hardik Pandya’s captaincy debut. By four wickets in 2025. Some of these losses are not losses where MI were outclassed.

They are losses where MI were right there, on the edge of breaking it, and then something happened in the last two overs and it did not happen. The curse doesn’t just beat MI in opening games. It beats them in the specific way that is hardest to move on from.

The complete record since 2013 reads like this. Lost to RCB by two runs. Lost to KKR by 41 runs. Lost to KKR by seven wickets. Lost to RPS by seven wickets. Lost to RPS by nine wickets. Lost to DC by 37 runs. Lost to CSK by one wicket. Lost to RCB by two wickets. Lost to CSK by five wickets. Lost to DC by four wickets. Lost to RCB by eight wickets. Lost to GT by six runs. Lost to CSK by four wickets. Thirteen seasons and thirteen defeats.

What Jasprit Bumrah has to do with any of this and the answer is nothing and everything

Here is where the theory gets philosophically interesting rather than statistically interesting. Jasprit Bumrah is not the reason MI lose opening games.

He has bowled brilliantly in most of them. He has taken wickets in most of them. The 2018 loss where Bravo hit him for 20 in the penultimate over was the exception rather than the rule and even then he recovered to be the franchise’s best bowler for the rest of that season which MI went on to win.

Jasprit Bumrah is not the curse. He arrived at the same time as the curse. That is a coincidence of timing that the universe seems committed to maintaining with a dedication that borders on personal.

But here is the other side of it that MI fans would point to immediately if you raised this theory in their presence. Since Bumrah joined in 2013 MI have won the IPL in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020.

Five titles in eight seasons. The most dominant period any franchise has had in IPL history.

The man signed in the year the opening game curse began is also the man most responsible for those five trophies. The curse started with Bumrah and so did the dynasty. If those two things are connected then the opening game loss is not a curse at all. It is the price of what comes after. And if losing the first game every year is what being a five-time champion costs then most MI fans, upon reflection, would pay that price without hesitation every single time.

IPL 2026 today at the Wankhede vs KKR and whether anything is different

MI face KKR today at the Wankhede Stadium and the familiar question has returned for the fourteenth time. Can they break it?

The conditions are more favorable than usual. KKR are missing Harshit Rana for the season, Matheesha Pathirana is not yet integrated and Mustafizur Rahman is unavailable. MI have Bumrah available and bowling as well as ever.

Mumbai Indians have a 24-11 head-to-head record against KKR. They are at home at the Wankhede where they win 62 percent of their games. Mahela Jayawardene has spoken about the intensity being right for the first game.

“I mean it is very different in the room, but there is no way for us to, I don’t think, prepare differently. I think we just…if you look at the season that I was involved in, we had close matches we lost. I think I have spoken to the boys about it – the intensity being there for that first game, I think that’s all we can control,” Mahela Jayawardene said.

None of that has mattered before. The two-run loss in 2013 happened when MI should have won. The one-wicket loss in 2018 happened at home at the Wankhede when the crowd was behind them and Bumrah was bowling.

The six-run loss in 2024 happened when they had every reason to believe the streak was ending. The streak didn’t end. It never ends. It just moves to the next season and waits.

Bumrah will bowl today. MI will try to win. The Wankhede will be full. And somewhere in the back of every MI fan’s mind will be the quiet, irrational, impossible-to-fully-dismiss thought that it started the year he arrived and it has not stopped since and nobody knows exactly what that means or whether tonight is finally the night it does.