On 6 April 2019, a 22-year-old Antiguan playing his first IPL match took six wickets for 12 runs in Hyderabad, and the best bowling figures the league had ever seen changed hands for the first time in eleven years. That was a single evening of IPL 2019. The same 56-match league stage also produced a batter who struck 52 sixes at a strike rate of 204.82, a run-out that split the cricket world in two, a captain walking onto the field to argue a no-ball, and a fourth-placed team that reached the playoffs having lost more games than it won.
The 2019 season is usually remembered for its ending: Mumbai Indians beating Chennai Super Kings by one run in the Hyderabad final on 12 May 2019. We have covered that night in full in our IPL 2019 final deep-dive. This piece is about the seven weeks before it, from 23 March to 5 May 2019, which were arguably the most eventful league stage in IPL history.
The Season Before the Final
23 March 2019: Seventy All Out, and a Tone Set
The season opened at Chepauk on 23 March 2019 with Royal Challengers Bangalore bowled out for 70 by Chennai. Harbhajan Singh was Player of the Match, CSK chased it down by seven wickets, and the pattern for both teams was set early. Chennai finished the league stage with nine wins from 14 games. Bangalore lost their first six matches of 2019, and despite a Virat Kohli hundred at Eden Gardens on 19 April 2019 (100 as RCB posted 213/4), they finished last on 11 points.
25 March 2019: The Run-Out That Divided Cricket
Two days later in Jaipur, Kings XI Punjab captain R Ashwin ran out Jos Buttler at the non-striker's end in the 13th over. Buttler had made 69 off 43 balls and Rajasthan were chasing 185. Ashwin did not warn him first. Once Buttler was gone, Rajasthan Royals collapsed to 170/9 and lost by 14 runs. Chris Gayle's 79 off 47 won him Player of the Match, but almost nobody remembers that.
The dismissal was within the Laws of Cricket in 2019. The argument was about the spirit of the game, and it ran for weeks. Ashwin held his position throughout, and the cricket world eventually came round to him. In 2022 the MCC moved this mode of dismissal out of the "unfair play" section of the Laws and into the ordinary run-out law. Few individual moments in IPL history have changed how the game is officially written down.
6 April 2019: Alzarri Joseph's 6/12
Mumbai defended only 136/7 against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium on 6 April 2019. Alzarri Joseph, on his IPL debut, bowled 3.4 overs and took 6/12, and SRH were all out for 96. That broke Sohail Tanvir's record of 6/14, set in the very first IPL season in 2008, and seven years on 6/12 remains the benchmark for an IPL bowling spell.
Joseph played only two more matches before a shoulder injury ended his season. He finished 2019 with six wickets, every one of them from that single night in Hyderabad.
11 April 2019: Dhoni Walks Onto the Field
In Jaipur on 11 April 2019, CSK needed 18 off the final over against Rajasthan. When the on-field umpires reversed a no-ball call, MS Dhoni, who had already been dismissed for 58, walked out of the dugout and onto the pitch to argue. He was fined half his match fee. Chennai still won by four wickets when Mitchell Santner hit the last ball for six. It was one of the very few public losses of composure in Dhoni's career, and that is why people remember it.
The Andre Russell Season
No account of IPL 2019 can skip what Andre Russell did for Kolkata Knight Riders. We have written a full profile of his 2019 campaign, so here are the numbers that matter for the season as a whole.
On 5 April 2019 at the Chinnaswamy, Kohli (84) and AB de Villiers (63) took RCB to 205/3. Russell then made 48 off 13 balls and KKR won by five wickets. On 28 April 2019 at Eden Gardens he made 80 off 40 as Kolkata posted 232/2, the highest total of the season. In the same match, Hardik Pandya replied with 91 off 34 balls in a losing chase.
Russell finished with 510 runs off 249 balls, 52 sixes and 11 wickets, and was named the season's Most Valuable Player. The 52 sixes were 18 more than the next best (Gayle, 34). It still wasn't enough. Kolkata lost six matches in a row in April and May 2019, finished level on 12 points with Sunrisers Hyderabad, and went out on net run rate.
The Super Over Russell Never Got to Finish
On 30 March 2019 KKR and Delhi tied on 185 at the Feroz Shah Kotla. Prithvi Shaw had made 99 off 55 and Russell 62 off 28. In the Super Over Kagiso Rabada bowled yorkers at Russell and dismissed him, and Delhi Capitals won. That one ball is a fair summary of KKR's season: their best player beaten by the bowler of the tournament.
Data Deep-Dive: IPL 2019 in Numbers
All figures below come from Cricsheet ball-by-ball records for the 60 matches of IPL 2019, including playoffs. Super Over deliveries are excluded, as they are from official season aggregates.
Leading Run-Scorers, IPL 2019
| Batter | Team | Inns | Runs | Balls | SR | 6s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Warner | SRH | 12 | 692 | 481 | 143.87 | 21 |
| KL Rahul | Kings XI Punjab | 14 | 593 | 438 | 135.39 | 25 |
| Quinton de Kock | MI | 16 | 529 | 398 | 132.91 | 25 |
| Shikhar Dhawan | DC | 16 | 521 | 384 | 135.68 | 11 |
| Andre Russell | KKR | 13 | 510 | 249 | 204.82 | 52 |
| Chris Gayle | Kings XI Punjab | 13 | 490 | 319 | 153.61 | 34 |
| Rishabh Pant | DC | 16 | 488 | 300 | 162.67 | 27 |
| Virat Kohli | RCB | 14 | 464 | 328 | 141.46 | 13 |
Warner's 692 won the Orange Cap even though he played only 12 innings. It was his first season back after the 2018 ball-tampering ban, and he flew home early to prepare for the World Cup. On 31 March 2019 he and Jonny Bairstow both made centuries against RCB (Bairstow 114, Warner 100), putting on 185 for the first wicket. That was the highest opening stand in IPL history at the time. SRH made 231/2 and won by 118 runs.
Leading Wicket-Takers, IPL 2019
| Bowler | Team | Wkts | Overs | Runs | Econ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imran Tahir | CSK | 26 | 64.2 | 431 | 6.70 |
| Kagiso Rabada | DC | 25 | 47.0 | 368 | 7.83 |
| Deepak Chahar | CSK | 22 | 64.3 | 482 | 7.47 |
| Shreyas Gopal | RR | 20 | 48.0 | 347 | 7.23 |
| Jasprit Bumrah | MI | 19 | 61.4 | 409 | 6.63 |
Tahir won the Purple Cap at 40, celebrating every wicket with the same full-length sprint. Rabada took 25 wickets in just 47 overs, a wicket every 11.3 balls, before a back injury sent him home ahead of the playoffs. Delhi never found a replacement. Shreyas Gopal's season included a hat-trick of Kohli, de Villiers and Marcus Stoinis on 30 April 2019, in a five-over match in Bengaluru that rain later washed out, so it officially ended without a result.
Final League Table, IPL 2019
| Pos | Team | P | W | L | NR | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mumbai Indians | 14 | 9 | 5 | 0 | 18 |
| 2 | Chennai Super Kings | 14 | 9 | 5 | 0 | 18 |
| 3 | Delhi Capitals | 14 | 9 | 5 | 0 | 18 |
| 4 | Sunrisers Hyderabad | 14 | 6 | 8 | 0 | 12 |
| 5 | Kolkata Knight Riders | 14 | 6 | 8 | 0 | 12 |
| 6 | Kings XI Punjab | 14 | 6 | 8 | 0 | 12 |
| 7 | Royal Challengers Bangalore | 14 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 11 |
| 8 | Rajasthan Royals | 14 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 11 |
Two league games went to Super Overs and are counted as wins here: Delhi over KKR on 30 March 2019, and Mumbai over SRH on 2 May 2019, when Bumrah defended the Super Over at the Wankhede. The 30 April washout in Bengaluru was the only no-result. Three teams finished on 18 points, Mumbai topped the table on net run rate, and three teams tied on 12 for the last place. Hyderabad took it on net run rate with six wins from 14 games, a losing record.
It was also the year Delhi came back. Renamed from Daredevils to Capitals before the season, the franchise reached its first playoffs since 2012. In the Eliminator in Visakhapatnam on 8 May 2019 they beat SRH by two wickets, with Pant Player of the Match. They then lost Qualifier 2 to Chennai by six wickets on 10 May 2019.
How the Final Was Won
Mumbai beat Chennai in Qualifier 1 at Chepauk on 7 May 2019 by six wickets, with Suryakumar Yadav Player of the Match, and the two sides met again in Hyderabad. Mumbai made 149/8. Shane Watson's 80 off 59 brought Chennai to the last over needing nine runs, with Lasith Malinga bowling. The over went 1, 1, 2, then Watson was run out, then 2, and Shardul Thakur was lbw to the final ball with two needed. CSK finished on 148/7. Dhoni had been run out for 2 in the 13th over. Bumrah, Player of the Match, conceded 14 runs in his four overs. Mumbai had won their fourth title, and their third against Chennai in a final.
Legacy Impact: What 2019 Means Now
IPL 2019 was the last season before the bio-bubble years: 2020 was played in the UAE without crowds, and 2021 was split across two countries. It was also the last season played under the old structure. The Impact Player rule arrived in 2023, and its effects are the clearest way to see how far the game has moved since 2019.
In 2019 the season's highest total was KKR's 232/2. Russell's strike rate of 204.82 looked like something from another sport. Since 2023 the extra batter has made 200-plus totals routine, and 2024 brought a run of 250-plus scores. The most useful way to read Russell's 2019 is as an early sight of where T20 batting was heading: a finisher who treated every ball as a boundary chance, years before teams built entire line-ups around that approach.
The 2019 squads also point to the leaders of today. Pant, then a 21-year-old hitting 162.67 per 100 balls for Delhi, now captains Lucknow Super Giants. Hardik, whose 91 off 34 was the season's most violent losing innings, now captains Mumbai. Shubman Gill, who made 76 off 45 for KKR in that 232/2 at Eden Gardens, now captains Gujarat Titans. And Bangalore, who finished last in 2019 after losing their first six, won their first title in 2025.
The CricMind Oracle has the same blind spot that 2019 exposed. Our pre-match model on /predictions scores sides on form, head-to-head and venue, and on those factors KKR in 2019 were a mid-table team. What no team rating captures is a single player, like Russell, who can turn a 25% chance into a win in 13 balls. That is why the Oracle publishes a confidence figure with every call, and why our calibration page shows how often a 60% favourite actually wins. IPL 2019, with two Super Overs and a final decided by one run, is a good reminder of how much a single over can change.
Three Takeaways
- The league stage of 2019 rivalled the final. Joseph's 6/12, the Buttler run-out, Dhoni's walk-on, Russell's 52 sixes and two league Super Overs all came before the playoffs began on 7 May 2019.
- Individual brilliance did not win the title. Russell (KKR) and Warner (SRH) had the two outstanding batting seasons. KKR missed the playoffs and SRH went out in the Eliminator, while Mumbai won with a deep squad and no one in the top four run-scorers bar de Kock.
- 2019 foreshadowed modern T20. A strike rate above 200 over a full season, a debutant fast bowler taking the record figures, and a Laws change that followed an IPL dismissal all point toward the game as it is played today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who won IPL 2019?
Mumbai Indians won IPL 2019, beating Chennai Super Kings by one run in the final at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Hyderabad, on 12 May 2019. It was Mumbai's fourth IPL title.
Who won the Orange Cap and Purple Cap in IPL 2019?
David Warner won the Orange Cap with 692 runs in 12 innings for Sunrisers Hyderabad. Imran Tahir won the Purple Cap with 26 wickets for Chennai Super Kings, one more than Kagiso Rabada's 25.
What are the best bowling figures in IPL history?
Alzarri Joseph's 6/12 for Mumbai Indians against Sunrisers Hyderabad on 6 April 2019, on his IPL debut. It broke Sohail Tanvir's 6/14 from the 2008 season.
How many sixes did Andre Russell hit in IPL 2019?
Andre Russell hit 52 sixes in IPL 2019, scoring 510 runs off 249 balls at a strike rate of 204.82. He also took 11 wickets and was named the season's Most Valuable Player, but KKR missed the playoffs on net run rate.
What was the Ashwin–Buttler Mankad controversy?
On 25 March 2019 in Jaipur, Kings XI Punjab captain R Ashwin ran out Jos Buttler at the non-striker's end without a warning while Buttler was on 69. It was legal under the Laws, but it started a long debate about the spirit of cricket. In 2022 the MCC reclassified the dismissal as an ordinary run-out.
Which team finished fourth in IPL 2019 with only six wins?
Sunrisers Hyderabad finished fourth with six wins and 12 points from 14 matches, edging Kolkata Knight Riders and Kings XI Punjab on net run rate. They lost the Eliminator to Delhi Capitals by two wickets.
Why did MS Dhoni walk onto the field in IPL 2019?
During CSK's chase against Rajasthan Royals in Jaipur on 11 April 2019, Dhoni walked onto the field to dispute a reversed no-ball call in the final over. He was fined 50% of his match fee. CSK won the match off the last ball.