IPLIM 2025：Kohli Virat Kohli Boss KKR Speden and Crime

Virat Kohli carried on from where he left off in the Indian Premier League last year to hit his 56th half-century in the tournament.

En route to his fifty, Kohli also reached 1,000 runs against Kolkata Knight Riders. That means almost 1/7th of his IPL career runs have come against KKR, a team which has forged a storied rivalry with RCB ever since Brendon McCullum smashed 158 in the first-ever match of the IPL 18 years ago.

Virat Kohli continues his golden touch

Virat Kohli, who had won the Orange Cap with 741 runs in 2024, kicked off IPL 2025 in style in a chase of 175 against Kolkata Knight Riders in the opening match of IPL 2025 at the Eden Gardens.

Already the leading all-time run-scorer in IPL history, Virat Kohli became the third Indian after Rohit Sharma and Dinesh Karthik to play 400 T20 matches. As RCB’s new recruit, gun opener, Phil Salt blazed away to a half-century, Kohli scored at an even higher rate but somehow stayed in the shadows.

Virat Kohli has been in stunning limited-overs form over the last year and a half. He finished as the leading run-scorer in the 2023 ODI World Cup, won the man-of-the-match award in the T20 World Cup final, and then smashed a hundred against Pakistan and a match-winning 85 versus Australia in India’s successful Champions Trophy campaign earlier in the year.

However, sandwiched between these stellar shows was a poor series of Test matches in Australia which Virat Kohli wants to forget in a hurry as his IPL story continues to unfold.

Virat Kohli, who has won the 2011 ODI World Cup, one T20 World Cup and 2 Champions Trophies, is yet to win the IPL