Joe Root IPL 2023: Rajasthan Royals’ English maestro in brief numbers England Test captain Joe Root made his long-awaited Indian Premier League debut in 2023 with Rajasthan Royals, but the fairytale stayed brief. In his solitary outing at the crease, Root faced 15 balls for 10 runs, striking one boundary and finishing unbeaten on 10. With no sixes, fifties or centuries in that lone innings, his strike-rate settled at 66—a rare single-digit story for a batter of his calibre. Tasked to roll his off-breaks for the first time in IPL colours, Root bowled two economical overs, conceding 14 runs off 12 balls at an economy of 7.0. Though he failed to claim a wicket, his tidy spell kept the scoring in check and hinted at the all-round value Royals had banked on. Across the 2023 campaign, Root featured in just one match, making the numbers read like a postcard rather than a chapter: 10 runs, 1 four, 0 sixes, 0 wickets, but a memorable Royals debut all the same.

Virat Kohli is the undisputed batting king of the Indian Premier League, a Royal Challengers Bengaluru lifer who has turned loyalty into legend across 18 electrifying seasons from 2008 to 2025. With 8,661 runs off 6,519 balls, Kohli is the league’s highest-ever run-getter, firing at a strike rate of 132 and painting every corner of every ground with 771 fours and 291 towering sixes. His 63 half-centuries and 8 hundreds—topped by a blistering 113*—tell the story of a man who converts starts into statements, walking in 259 innings and delivering a match-defining fifty or hundred in roughly one out of every four trips to the crease. While he has rolled his arm over occasionally, claiming four wickets from 26 bowling innings, it is with the bat that Kohli has authored the IPL’s most enduring chronicle, forever clad in the red and gold of RCB.

Note: This overview is partially generated using AI and is based on statistical data. Please verify with official sources for complete accuracy.