Ahmedabad: Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s players and support staff will disperse to their respective homes and holiday time from Ahmedabad rather than return to Bengaluru immediately to celebrate their second successive Indian Premier League (IPL) crown.
“Well, firstly, I don’t think any of us are going to Bangalore, unfortunately. I’m traveling back to the UK tomorrow. Rajat, I’m sure, will be heading home to his family and I think Andy’s got a holiday planned. So we’ll have to wait a little bit longer before we can get back amongst our fans and to enjoy some of their excitement and happiness, which is always nice to experience,” Mo Bobat, RCB’s Director of Cricket, told IANS in a virtual press conference on Monday.
With the afterglow of the championship win still high, Bobat and skipper Rajat Patidar stated that the franchise’s balanced approach to data and analytics, especially roping in Freddie Wilde as their lead analyst, has been a key factor in them transforming as a title-winning unit since 2025.
For the longest time, RCB were the IPL’s biggest underachievers – a star-studded unit who would always fall short of winning the trophy when it mattered the most. But since 2025, that narrative has undergone a dramatic shift by becoming only the third IPL side to win back-to-back IPL titles.
The turnaround has not come not from one marquee signing or a dramatic tactical overhaul. Instead, it has been shaped by a measured, data and evidence based approach for constructing the squad and preparing for matches.
Under Bobat, Wilde, head coach Andy Flower and batting coach-cum-mentor Dinesh Karthik, data and analytics have now become central to how RCB operate and compete as a unit, which in turn has helped them shed the ‘nearly men’ tag associated with them.
“In terms of the sort of data related questions, both Andy and I are very similar in our views in that we don’t overly focus on data. Data is obviously quite a hot topic in elite sport at the minute. We don’t focus too much on that. But what I do think we share in common is a desire to have evidence based decision making and therefore, by definition, if you want evidence to support your decisions or to inform your decisions, then you’re going to pay attention to the data that’s available to you.
“So we really value and we recognize the importance of our judgment as decision makers. We make important decisions about players’ careers, about their dreams, about their livelihoods. So, we both think it’s our responsibility to do that with an element of rigour.
“If you’re going to do that, then you will pay attention to evidence, information, data, expert opinion, whatever you want to call it. Philosophically, we both believe in that information being a combination of the more objective kind of numbers that can tell you a story, but also what some of our expert eyes and ears see and hear and what they can tell us as well, because it’s all information that helps us make those evidence based decisions.
“So very balanced view in our sort of in our ways of working and I’d like to think that Rajat’s experiences that as captain and that we will share insights with him that might be data informed, as well as some of our own gut feel and intuition. A part of the reason why we engaged DK in the role that we engaged him in is that he has a very active tactical mind and we can learn from his many experiences as a person as well,” elaborated Bobat.
Wilde is the lead analyst of current ILT20 holders Desert Vipers and The Hundred franchise London Spirit, after being with the England men’s team. He also came into limelight after authoring a chapter in the Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution book titled ‘Why CSK win and why RCB lose.’
Cut to now, and Wilde has played a key role in turning around RCB’s fortunes. “So a real mix there and you referenced Freddie and it’s important to recognize the quality of his work. We’ve worked with Freddie for a few years now. He’s an outstanding analyst and the things that stand him out, I think, would be he is able to kind of manoeuvre between thinking like an analyst and also thinking and operating a bit like a coach and that’s quite nice territory.
“As someone who can do that, that also means we can trust him in his communication with players and groups in a way that you might not always give sort of analyst responsibilities. He’s also quite practically minded. He realizes that the numbers won’t always tell the full story.
“So he appreciates that there is subjectivity and context that binds a lot of the analytics that we’ll do. But in short, his contributions have been huge, particularly if you think about things like the importance of building a squad and auction planning, which we invest a lot of preparation and time into.
“Then we have quite a rigorous planning and review process as we go through the season and Freddie leads a lot of that work alongside Andy. So, obviously, I can’t speak much more glowingly about Freddie’s work.
“He’s been excellent and a real value add for the franchise, helps players, support staff, coaches on a number of levels. But the headline would be that we’re kind of we’re very balanced in our view – the human and the machine are probably both key parts of our process,” explained Bobat.
Flower, who added another IPL title to his growing cabinet of winning franchise T20 league trophies as the head coach, gave a little hint about how being data reliant sparked Patidar’s turnaround in being a ferocious pace hitter in this season. “I’m not going to answer anything, but I really want to hear Rajat’s answer about the use of data.”
As per statistics from Cricket-21, Patidar has emerged as one of the most destructive batters against pace in IPL 2026, with his numbers showing a remarkable jump from last season. In 2025, Patidar managed 190 runs in 13 innings against pacers at an average of 23.8 and a strike rate of 143, hitting just six sixes and recording a boundary percentage of 58.9, while his boundary per ball (BPB) ratio stood at 5.3.
But in 2026, the turnaround has been emphatic this year. Across the same number of innings, Patidar has piled up 377 runs against pacers at an average of 62.8 and a strike rate of 189. He has cleared the ropes 28 times, with his BPB improving to 3.6 and boundary percentage soaring to 73.2. Patidar credited Wilde’s expertise for helping him sharpen his batting against pacers, apart from retaining his strengths of bashing spinners.
“To be honest, it was beautifully explained by Mo regarding Freddie and I can say from my personal experience as well. Four or five times in the IPL, I called Freddie and he said, ‘Freddie, I need some videos of the bowlers, especially spinners who are like Rashid Khan, Sunil Narine and Varun Chakaravarthy, where you have to pick their balls from the hand.’
“So on some days, I was feeling some difficulties in reading them from the videos. So I called Freddie by saying, ‘Freddie, please help me. What’s the difference in these bowlers who are bowling two or three deliveries, or different deliveries and from where I can pick him? So what’s the difference?’
“So I think Freddie helped me a lot in this and that’s why I give credit to Freddie. So people always used to say to me that Rajat is a spin basher. But to be honest, I always like to play fast bowling. But if I talk about spin and picking up the bowlers from their hands, the credit goes to Freddie because he helped me a lot,” concluded Patidar.
(IANS)
