Royal Challengers Bangalore: To dare is to hope

Virat Kohli paused for a bit and then chuckled away a suggestion that his IPL duck was a minor blot on his legacy. "I don't care whether I'm going to be judged on this [winning the IPL]," he would later say, ahead of the 2019 season. "I am doing what I am supposed to do. Sometimes it doesn't happen and we have to be practical about it. No excuses for that. Only acceptance of the faults that we made in the past."

Kohli, a rare one-team star in a tournament that embraces flux, will begin his eighth season as captain of Royal Challengers Bangalore. The last three have seen his team finish last, sixth and last again. If well-meaning voices from the camp are to be believed, this is their year, as assuredly as the previous ones were.

There are grounds for this overt optimism. The texture of the India skipper's last three RCB campaigns, despite a steady flow of runs from his bat, have been defined by what preceded and followed the IPL. In 2017, he missed the start of the season having picked up a shoulder injury at the end of a gruelling 13-Test home season. The Champions Trophy followed immediately. In 2018, India were in the middle of their crucial overseas Test run, with Kohli keeping one eye on the big England tour and a possible County assignment before it. Last year, the World Cup and workloads hogged his narrative.

There's a reason why Kohli has admitted to feeling calm entering an IPL season for the first time. By cruel design or otherwise, he has had five months of rest and a rare month of preseason with the squad. Muddled selections or slow starts, the kind of which have seen RCB accumulate a 13-28 win-loss record (one no-result) at the league's half-way mark over the last six years, will not cut it.

There is already little to fault in a quartet of Kohli, AB de Villiers, Moeen Ali and Yuzvendra Chahal. The eternal search for a player who can straddle the line as a finisher with both bat and ball has now stopped at Chris Morris. The elephant in the room, as ever, is if the rest of the moving parts can create synergy with the cogs.

Over the years, RCB have been more susceptible than most to Hope's seductions. Even as IPL's elite - the MIs and the CSKs - recede into the distance, RCB are buoyed by the promise of what a refreshed captain, new