On the eve of the IPL 2026 final, with Royal Challengers Bengaluru preparing to defend their title against Gujarat Titans at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the senior bowlers took the optional training session off. Josh Hazlewood, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, men who had carried the attack all season, men who had nothing left to prove to anyone, rested. Rasikh Salam Dar came in and bowled.
To understand why, you have to go back to a selection trial in Srinagar in 2018, where a teenager with misaligned arms and an extraordinary back-of-the-hand slower ball was already walking away. He had been to these trials before, every year, as a junior. He had never made the 30-member squad. He had learned, the hard way, not to wait for the rejection to find him standing still.
He was still walking when Irfan Pathan told an assistant to go and stop him.
For a man who has spent his career learning that opportunities do not wait, that doors open and close and sometimes do not open again, an optional training session on the eve of an IPL final is not optional. It never was.
DON’T GO YET
Rasikh Salam Dar, 26, from Kulgam in Kashmir, finished IPL 2026 as RCB’s second-leading wicket-taker: 19 wickets in 12 matches, four more than Hazlewood, at an average of 21.32. In the final, he took 3 for 27, dismissed Nishant Sindhu, Rahul Tewatia and Rashid Khan, and became only the second uncapped player in IPL history to take three or more wickets in a tournament final. RCB restricted Gujarat Titans to 155 for 8 and won by five wickets to lift back-to-back titles.
And yet, for much of the season, Rasikh operated in exactly the kind of silence he has always inhabited. He came on at first or second change, behind Bhuvneshwar and Hazlewood. He completed his four-over quota in eight of his 12 appearances. He did not produce a spell that stopped conversations mid-sentence or a send-off that trended overnight. He just took wickets, kept his economy tight, and made batsmen feel — slightly too late — that they had misread something.
Irfan Pathan was the mentor of the J&K cricket setup in 2018, sorting through 70 or 80 boys at a time, looking for something worth keeping. Most of them blurred into one another. Rasikh nearly walked out before Pathan could decide.
“I saw him bowling a few balls, and after bowling a few balls, I told him to stand on the side. Then he started walking away because he thought he wasn’t selected. He kept walking away with his brother,” Pathan recalls in his chat with IndiaToday.in.
“I asked him, ‘Why were you leaving? I told you to stay there.’ He said, ‘I thought it’s happening like every year. I used to come here for junior trials and I never used to be part of the 30-member squad.'”
The history of early rejection was written all over the teenager. But Pathan had already written his name in his book.
He was not an obvious prospect. He is not tall. He does not carry the frame that announces a fast bowler from across a ground. His alignment was off, his delivery stride collapsing under him. But there were two things Pathan could not walk past: the zip, and the back-of-the-hand slower ball.
“His alignment was not right, he was falling over a lot. But he was beating the batsman with the zip. And that slower one — back of the hand — was very impressive. Generally, it doesn’t happen on a regular basis.”
Pathan put him in the senior squad. The politics started almost immediately. Local selectors pushed back, regional loyalties fractured the room, one selector reportedly resigned in protest. Pathan absorbed all of it without a word.
“I played for India. For me, talent is much more important than all this politics. I didn’t even give any statement in public because it’s not me. I am there to do my job, and I did my job anyway.”
ONE AIRPORT VIDEO
The path to Mumbai Indians, Rasikh’s first IPL franchise, was assembled piece by piece. Pathan managed a hip-flexor issue, kept Rasikh in the Vijay Hazare squad, worked on his fitness with an Under-19 tour to England in mind. Then came the moment that changed the trajectory — Pathan, transiting through Mumbai airport, ran into Rahul Sanghvi, head of scouting at Mumbai Indians, and pulled out his phone. On it: Rasikh bowling with the new ball in a practice match, a big banana inswinger, a hat-trick.
Mumbai Indians have built much of their dynasty on exactly this kind of find — the uncut diamond, the raw talent that others walked past, and Sanghvi knew what he was looking at. He watched carefully and promised a trial. When it came, Rohit Sharma and T.A. Sekar were in the nets. They were impressed. Mumbai Indians signed him.
“Mumbai, to be very honest, were the first team who really looked after him,” Pathan says. “Even in the off-season they looked after him. They gave him a base. They supported him all the time.”
One match in 2019. Then the ban.
Rasikh was among more than 200 cricketers penalised by the BCCI that year for submitting faulty birth certificates. He was 18. His career had barely drawn breath. The two years that followed stripped away everything: the franchise support, the momentum, the sense that cricket was something that would keep happening to him.
“When you get a ban, you don’t have anywhere to go,” Pathan says.
“This is the time where you really want support and you really desire support. Sometimes you don’t say it, but you desire the support.”
Pathan’s philosophy as a mentor does not allow for fair-weather presence.
“My job is not to be there when they’re doing well. When they’re doing well, they’re on their own. They enjoy. They’re like birds — they fly and have fun. But when they’re struggling, this is the time of the mentor. This is the time of true support.”
He stayed. Meetings when their paths crossed. Calls from wherever either of them happened to be. Conversations with the family, who were watching a career they had barely started celebrating look like it might not happen at all.
The return from the ban brought its own complication. Back in the IPL fold with KKR in 2022, Rasikh managed only two matches — and an injury that was never properly identified during his time there quietly undermined everything. He could not play regularly, could not build momentum, could not show what the six years since that Srinagar trial had produced.
Pathan decided words and phone calls were not enough. He called Ashish Kaushik, a physiotherapist and trusted friend with a private clinic in Bengaluru, and arranged for Rasikh to go. Not for a month. Not for a defined rehabilitation window. For six months.
He stayed in Bengaluru, away from home, far from Kashmir, working through it day by day. Kaushik rebuilt him, session by session, until the body that had been quietly failing him was no longer a liability. “He stayed there for six months, worked hard and his fitness became better,” Pathan says. “As soon as his fitness improved, he started playing better cricket.”
Through the ban, through the injury, through six months in a city not his own, Rasikh kept training. Kept playing local cricket. Kept showing up.
“Credit to his mental strength more than anything else,” Pathan says. “It was not about anyone else. It was about him and how he managed it. The man who goes through tough times, only that man knows. Sometimes you won’t even listen to people at those stages.”
“That two-year ban made him a man. It really made him a man because he was a boy before.”
FOURTH CLUB. FIRST CHANCE
The return, when it came, was slow. Two matches for KKR in 2022. Then Delhi Capitals, where something finally steadied: nine wickets in eight matches in 2024, enough to make the league look again. RCB paid Rs 6 crore for him at the 2025 mega auction. His first season in Bengaluru yielded two matches and one wicket. Four franchises, one proper run, and a price tag that looked, to anyone watching from outside, like an act of faith bordering on stubbornness.
But RCB did not flinch. And on Krunal Pandya’s advice, Rasikh made a move in 2025 that would prove quietly decisive — shifting his domestic affiliation from J&K to Baroda, in search of a fuller season, better competitive exposure, more cricket. He played the whole season. He came back sharper.
When Yash Dayal’s absence opened a place in RCB’s pace attack this season, the management first turned to left-arm pacer Abhinandan Singh. It did not work out. Then came Rasikh. He did not let the door close behind him.
Rajat Patidar watched it all from the inside and was never surprised.
“When we gave a chance to Rasikh, he looked confident because he has been playing in the IPL for three to four years,” he said.
“He is very confident about his skills, his slower ones, back-of-the-hand deliveries and especially yorkers. Whenever I see him, it is clear that he has clarity about his role and what he has to do. I always tell my bowlers: if you have a plan, go and execute it. That’s it.”
Irfan Pathan, asked what he would tell his former student now, does not linger on the title or the wickets in the final. He talks about getting better — always getting better, or finding a way to outsmart batters when pace and variations reach their ceiling. He invokes Sachin Tendulkar, staying a student until his last day.
“Try and get better. And if you’re not able to get better, always outsmart the batters. Always read the game. Have that awareness.”
“I always knew he could do a lot more. I think he can bowl with the new ball as well. He has the talent to bowl with the new ball and swing it both ways. The way you see Bhuvi manoeuvre the wrist, he has the same abilities.”
And then, with the warmth of someone who has known a cricketer since before the cricketer knew himself, Pathan says something that has nothing to do with seam position or new-ball duties.
“I always want him to bat at number eight. I always tease him saying ‘you can’t bat’. But I know he can.”
The title has been won. The final has been bowled. Somewhere in the margins of what Rasikh Salam Dar has already done, quietly, there is still more to come.
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