Only net run-rate separated them on the points table. In eight matches going back to 2013, the head-to-head record is 4-4.
This season, Royal Challengers piled up 227 for four on home turf, as they brushed aside Sunrisers Hyderabad by 45 runs.
Hyderabad returned the favour three weeks later, piling up 194 for five en route to a 15-run win.
The Indian Premier League final may be at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on Sunday night, but notions of home advantage aside, it is hard to think of two more evenly matched sides.
Bangalore may have had a stellar second half of the season, winning six and losing only one, but the Chinnaswamy is hardly a fortress.
Delhi Daredevils, Kolkata Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians all won this season, though Bangalore have crossed 200 three times in eight matches there.
The simplistic narrative would have this as a contest between Bangalore’s all-star batting and the Hyderabad bowling.
But the reality is far from that. The bowlers have been pivotal to Bangalore’s late-season resurgence, with Yuzvindra Chahal, the leg-spinner from Haryana, and Shane Watson both having taken 20 wickets.
Only Hyderabad’s Bhuvneshwar Kumar has more, topping the charts with 23.
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Sreenath Aravind, one of the local boys in the Bangalore side, is 32 and is unlikely to add much to the one Twenty20 international cap he won against South Africa last year.
But he has excelled with the new ball in the second half of the season, and with Chris Jordan showing signs of adjusting to the conditions, Bangalore’s bowling no longer looks paperweight.
Jordan himself was a mid-tournament replacement, as Bangalore lost Mitchell Starc, Samuel Badree and Adam Milne to injury.
Hyderabad have gone in the other direction. Ashish Nehra limped out after eight games, taking with him both considerable nous and wicket-taking form.
Mustafizur Rahman, by far the most economical of the leading wicket-takers, tweaked a hamstring before the qualifier against Gujarat Lions, and is a doubtful starter for the final.
If both he and Nehra are missing, Bhuvneshwar’s four overs will have a huge bearing on the result.
After a wretched year and a half, he has once again started showing the form that made him such a revelation on a Test tour of England in 2014.
He is swinging the ball, at a lively pace, and has taken a large proportion of his wickets in the final overs of the innings.
Given the conditions at the Chinnaswamy though, you sense that the bowlers will be cast in supporting roles.
The destination of the trophy will most likely come down to which of the heavy hitters makes the biggest dent.
Virat Kohli, who has smashed four hundreds and six 50s on his way to 919 runs, and AB de Villiers have made 1,601 runs this season between them in 15 games.
The entire Rising Pune Supergiants squad managed just 2,025.
In another season, without Kohli’s mindboggling feats, David Warner (779 runs) would have been a record-breaker.
But his partnership with Shikhar Dhawan (473 runs) will need to click if Hyderabad are to pull off an upset.
Bangalore have the better support cast, too.
Lokesh Rahul, who once represented Hyderabad, has 386 runs from just 11 innings, at a superb strike-rate of 147.32.
There is also the very real possibility that Watson (168 runs) and Chris Gayle (151) will choose the showpiece occasion to remind spectators of what they can do.
Gayle was the star performer the last time Bangalore reached the final, in 2011.
Back then, in a match headlined by some of the greats of the white-ball game, it was Chennai’s Murali Vijay that stole the show, with a 52-ball 95.
You sense that Sunrisers Hyderabad will need a similar bolt from the blue to prevail over the Bangalore batting juggernaut.
New BCCI chief must push to make Shastri full-time India coach
Over the past few decades, Indian politicians have made it a point to emphasise their [faux] simplicity, wearing homespun clothes and eschewing other indicators of wealth.
Anurag Thakur, who was elected unopposed as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) last Sunday, is not about to go down that path. The last time this correspondent met him, he was wearing Hermes jeans and Louis Vuitton shoes.
The son of a former chief minister of Himachal Pradesh, Thakur has gone down in Indian cricket lore as the man who captained his state side in his only first-class appearance.
That Ranji Trophy outing allowed him to become a state selector and begin a 15-year-long journey through the mazy corridors of Indian cricket administration.
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Thakur, now 41, became board secretary in March 2015, winning the election by one vote, and with Jagmohan Dalmiya – the president, who passed away last September – largely incapacitated, he quickly left his imprint on proceedings.
The board adopted a more enlightened media policy, and it was quick to emphasise greater transparency in its dealings with the courts. That said, the recommendations of the Supreme Court-appointed Lodha Committee are yet to be fully implemented.
Being a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the expectation is that Thakur will be able to prevent cataclysmic changes to the board’s way of functioning.
If nothing else, it is by far the most professionally run sports authority in the country, and it does not depend on the taxpayers’ largesse to pay its bills.
His immediate task, however, is to take care of on-field matters. Sanjay Bangar, who functioned as assistant coach for 18 months while Ravi Shastri was team director, will oversee the team in Zimbabwe in June. But a new coach, with a mandate through to the 2019 World Cup, is expected to take charge before India head to the Caribbean for four Tests in July.
Thakur will doubtless assess applications from across the world, but the smart choice would be to continue with Shastri, who has helped revive the team’s fortunes in every format. More importantly, he shares a similar attitude and an excellent rapport with Virat Kohli, the Test captain.
If Thakur can get this very important call right, it will be an important first step towards a successful tenure.
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