Jitesh Sharma once told AB de Villiers he prays for the top order to fail so he can be the hero. On Go Green day against DC the stage was set exactly as he had wished for. What followed was the slowest T20 innings of his career and an RCB total of 175 that felt 30 runs short of where it should have been.

Jitesh Sharma prayed for his moment at the Chinnaswamy and then scored 14 Off 20

Earlier this year in February Jitesh Sharma sat down with AB de Villiers on ABD 360 and said something that was honest enough to be endearing and specific enough to be remembered.

He said he prays to God before every game to let his top order fail so he can walk out and be the hero, that he sees a chance to pull off something magical every time there is a crisis in the middle. It was the kind of admission that made you like him immediately because it was real and because the hunger behind it felt genuine.

“You won’t believe, I always pray to God, let my top order get collapsed and I can bat and score. I see it as an opportunity to become a hero. I always visualize such innings in my life. I am such a person; I have always wanted to do something magical.

Being in the present, focus on your breathing, seeing the scoreboard, what’s required, what’s not required, calculating such things, being yourself, I think help me to handle that pressure. Be yourself, focus on your own assets. What shot should be required now, which bowler is bowling, focusing on such things, so automatically your pressure just goes away,” Jitesh told AB de Villiers on his YouTube channel.

On Go Green day at the Chinnaswamy against Delhi Capitals the cricket gods appeared to have heard him. Phil Salt was back in the hut.

Rajat Patidar was gone.

The Chinnaswamy crowd needed something from someone and the stage was sitting there empty waiting for whoever had the nerve to claim it. Jitesh Sharma walked out and scored 14 off 20 balls at a strike rate of 70, the slowest innings of his T20 career in any match where he has faced a minimum of 20 deliveries. RCB posted 175 for 8.

The death overs produced 29 runs from five of them. Lungi Ngidi and Mukesh Kumar walked off the Chinnaswamy having done exactly what Jitesh’s batting allowed them to do. The prayer had been answered. The magic had not arrived.

The numbers against pace this IPL 2026 season are not a rough patch

A single bad innings can be explained away as a difficult pitch or a good spell of bowling. Six innings of accumulated evidence is a different conversation entirely.

Across IPL 2026 Jitesh Sharma has faced pace bowling in six innings and produced 22 runs from 29 balls with five dismissals, an average of 4.4 and a strike rate of 75.86. Those numbers are not the statistics of a finisher having a lean run.

They are the statistics of a batsman who has a genuine and specific technical problem against pace at this moment in the season and who is being exposed every time the opposition identifies it and bowls accordingly.

Tonight DC bowled accordingly. Ngidi and Mukesh attacked him with pace and length and Jitesh, a player who at his best is one of the most explosive finishers in Indian domestic cricket, batted like someone wading through something heavy and unfamiliar.

The 70 strike rate across 20 balls in the death overs of a T20 match where RCB needed to be scoring above 150 was not just a personal failure. It was the direct reason the total settled at 175 rather than the 200 or above that this Chinnaswamy pitch and this RCB batting lineup should have been able to produce.

Jitesh Sharma vs Pace (IPL 2026):

• Innings: 6
• Runs: 22
• balls: 29
• Dismissals: 5
• Average: 4.4
• Strike Rate: 75.86
• Tonight vs DC: 14 off 20 (career-low SR of 70)

RCB’s bigger question is whether the keeper spot and the batting spot should still belong to Jitesh Sharma.

The one-handed catch that Jitesh Sharma took to dismiss Sameer Rizvi was genuinely exceptional, the kind of take that reminds you why keeping wicket is a specialist skill and why RCB have valued his gloves throughout this season. He is not a liability behind the stumps and his work there has been consistently clean even as the batting has crumbled.

But the conversation that is now unavoidable in the RCB camp is whether Phil Salt, a proven international keeper who opened the batting tonight and produced 63 off 38 as the only real attacking innings of the RCB middle to late order, should be moved to full-time keeping duties to free up the overseas batter slot that Jitesh currently occupies.

RCB bought Venkatesh Iyer for 7 crore in the 2026 mini-auction specifically to provide the kind of versatile middle order power hitting that has been absent in their death overs. That investment is sitting unused on the bench while Jitesh Sharma averages 4.4 against pace in the position that demands the most from him against pace.

RCB are second on the table with a net run rate of plus 1.503 and four wins from five and they are not a team in crisis. But 29 runs in the last five overs against a DC bowling attack that is not the most fearful in the competition is a specific and solvable problem and the solution is sitting in their own dressing room waiting to be used.