India, March 26 -- So brilliant was Shreyas Iyer with the bat in Punjab's IPL 2025 opener against Gujarat Titans in Ahmedabad that his impressive captaincy almost went unnoticed. Iyer's 42-ball 97* with nine sixes was, in many ways, a complete T20 innings. The fact that he selflessly told Shashank Singh to go for as many boundaries as possible towards the end of the PBKS innings when he was three runs short of his maiden IPL century added marshmallow to hot chocolate. But as it is the norm nowadays in the IPL, if a side muscles its way through a mammoth total, as PBKS did with 243/5, there is a high possibility that the opponents would give a good crack at it, exactly like GT did.

The difference here was the death bowling of the two side...