How India's World Cup winners will define the new Season of IPL

On 8 March, in the final of the ICC men’s T20 cricket World Cup, India’s Jasprit Bumrah bowled New Zealand captain Mitchell Santner on his way to grabbing four wickets and the player of the match award. India won the match, and retained the World Cup they won two years earlier.

Three weeks later, Bumrah and Santner would be teammates, plotting other dismissals as they gather up for Mumbai Indians (MI) in the 19th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL). MI will play Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in IPL’s second match on 29 March, after the league’s opening tie on 28 March.

Match-ups, rivalries and competitions swirl about in modern cricket as national duties and league loyalties interchange. For the title-winning Indian team members, the euphoria of the title will last just a couple of weeks as they pad up for the IPL. Form is fickle, 20 overs fly past in an instant and the next match comes up.

Fortunately for the Indian Cup-winning players, the adjustment to IPL need not come for the format (T20) nor the venues (India) but in strategies. But last fortnight’s teammate is next weekend’s adversary, a bowling partner could be bowling at you instead of with you.

India’s win was a team effort, as captain Suryakumar Yadav said recently in an interview to The Indian Express, with several players making significant contributions that combined into a winning performance. Some of these players would want to carry that form into the IPL, others would want to do better, which only makes the IPL a worthy successor to the World Cup. Here’s a look at five World Cup stars and their IPL legacy.

Sanju Samson

It requires a reminder that Samson made his international debut a decade ago, because widely accepted success has come now, with the 2026 World T20. Easily the most watchable of Indian batsmen, his fluent stroke play pacifies the purists of the game; his T20I strike-rate of over 150 makes him a crowd pleaser.

He is among the few players who made his fame in the IPL before playing for India. He is also among a few to have played for just one IPL team, Rajasthan Royals, for 11 seasons (barring two seasons in the middle when RR was banned and he moved to Delhi).

This season is special because, one, the glow of World T20 success would follow him, having been named the player of the tournament for his 320 runs in five matches. The impact of that award lies in that Samson played only just over half of India’s nine matches, cracking an unbeaten 97, 89, 89 in his last three matches. Two, Samson moves out of RR, a team he captained, and into the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) this season. It’s the kind of inflection point that’s tricky to navigate, to replicate an old successful formula (of the IPL) in a new setting (CSK) so soon after finding new success (World T20) in an old package (Indian team).

Jasprit Bumrah

Commentators seem to run out of adjectives when describing Bumrah’s bowling. His action, those deceptive slower balls, the miserliness, all get analysed threadbare. If an understanding of his bowling was possible, batsmen would have figured him out by now.

In the World T20, Bumrah had 14 wickets—as did Varun Chakravarthy—in eight matches, at an economy rate of a little over six. If cricket had been a fairer format and less partial to batters, Bumrah would have been the player of the tournament.

Like Samson, Bumrah has played for only one IPL team, Mumbai Indians, for 13 seasons. Like Samson, he found his way into the Indian team through IPL success, but has been more consistent across formats. His economy rate through these IPL seasons has been under eight, barring two seasons.

IPL 2026 will be a mild transition for Bumrah in that success is not new for him. It would be easy to expect him to continue in the same vein for the next two-and-a-half months as commentators continue to struggle to describe his potent yorkers.

Shivam Dube

“No one will remember, but he (Dube) scored 27 off 15 balls in the 2024 World Cup final—the most important contribution that day…” Yadav told The Indian Express a few days after the title win. “His role (in 2026) was simple: if he bats, he creates impact; if he bowls, he covers a few overs. He was another underrated player in this tournament.”

While Dube started his IPL career with Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) in 2019, he found success only when he joined CSK in 2022. In the 2023 season, he slammed 35 sixes while scoring 418 runs, filling in a middle-lower order role that was previously covered by Dhoni.

In the World T20, batting at No.7, Dube would come in with a few overs left, so his impact was not purely statistical. Scores of 23, 27, 66, 42, 8, 43, 26 came at a strike rate of under 170. With a batting average of near 40, Dube packed in a lot in little time.

He has averaged over 30 in the last three IPL seasons with impressive strike rates. The world champion tag could only give more power to his left-handed lofted sixes.

Hardik Pandya

He is one of the original IPL successes, since 2015 for MI, which propelled him into the national team and made him an all-format player for a while. Pandya has every kind of success at the IPL, with the bat, the ball and winning four trophies with MI. He created a stir when he joined the newly created Gujarat Titans in 2022 as captain and promptly led them to a title.

There was much more drama to follow. In IPL 2024, he was back in Mumbai as captain, replacing Rohit Sharma who had led the team for years. Through these years for Pandya, there have been controversial comments on a talk show, a hyped marriage and its collapse, injuries and returns.

He had a couple of half-centuries in this World Cup, 217 runs and nine wickets, but provided a balance to the side that was invaluable. Yadav said in his interview that he and Pandya had a chat with the team after their only loss, to South Africa, in the World T20, which changed the tide for the team subsequently.

Pandya still has work to do in MI, especially since his taking over from Sharma did not please the latter’s fans.

Ishan Kishan

Kishan’s 77 off 40 against Pakistan may seem special because it was against that team, but the knock’s impact was in how he scored those runs, on a wicket that wasn’t easy to score off. Others who made some runs, from both sides, struggled for fluency, unlike Kishan.

Kishan too came through the ranks of the IPL, scoring over 500 runs for MI in the 2020 season that brought him a place in the national side the next year. He has since last year moved on to Sunrisers Hyderabad, where his opening partner will again be his India teammate Abhishek Sharma. Kishan goes into the new season not just off a World Cup-winning campaign, but also off a final against New Zealand that worked like a charm.

He scored 54 off 25 balls while batting at No.3 and then took three catches in the outfield as India won the final comprehensively.

Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.