Punjab Kings, are you proud of the season you had?

Punjab Kings’ social media accounts went unusually quiet on Sunday after the team was knocked out of the Indian Premier League playoffs. Perhaps for the first time this season, Punjab’s hyperactive social media team had nothing to say.

Where I come from, in the eastern parts of India, the elders say that if you have nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all. But they are from another age, from the values of another time. What do they know about social media engagement? And how are the fan wars for cliques, which affect millions of people every day?

Social media has been a big part of the Punjab Kings’ persona this season. The snarky reactions and hyper-aggressive comebacks suit a younger audience. Just like they are on the field, Punjab’s social media team is fearless.

But more often than not, that’s gone wrong this season. Because at the end of the day a A Twitter handle can’t win you games when the universe decides to check your ego.

Cricket or any other sport is basically a game of circles. Good days turn to bad, bad to good, and even absolute legends only win a little more than half of their battles. Usually, respect in sports is built on a pretty basic secondary requirement: how you behave when you’re actually winning or losing.

If you want a masterclass in how not to do that, just look at how Punjab’s season has started.

In the rosy first half of the season, the social media team was practically self-sufficient. Remember that a rain-affected game where they shared the points with Kolkata Knight Riders? They actually posted a video that basically says, “Here, take your one point. We’re giving it to you because we have such a big heart.”

It was the ultimate arrogance, but hey, sports thrive on adrenaline. It’s easy to go overboard when you start a season undefeated in seven games. But this is where these Eastern elders come back into the picture with their wisdom about circles. They knew exactly how it worked, that what goes up must come down, and life has a funny way of balancing things out. Once the luck ran out on the field, those exact same sharp tweets came back to bite them. Hard.

The timeline suddenly wasn’t full of cheeky pranks; it was full of fires that they had to put out. It all started because Riyan Parag has already been punished for vaping in Rajasthan Royals dressing roomwhich put the entire league on high alert. So, when a video of Yuzvendra Chahal vaping in flight was leaked, opponents smelled blood in the water. They used it to completely thrash the Punjab Kings for a massive lapse in basic discipline.

Then came the Arshdeep Singh vlogs. Now, no one expects the young fast bowler to be the nation’s ultimate moral compass, but maybe common colorism and locker room bullying shouldn’t be a type of “content” are you pushing millions of kids who look up to you? Just a thought.

Arshdeep Singh made racist comments on Tilak Varma.

Arshdeep called Tilaka “andhera” (darkness) and compared his skin tone to that of Naman Dhir.

Tilak Varma responded maturely and said, “I will not support it. Let’s concentrate on tomorrow’s match.” pic.twitter.com/VPX9hkg6nP— EpicCommentsTelugu (@EpicCmntsTelugu) May 14, 2026

Naturally, when your off-field atmosphere is this chaotic, cricket takes notice. Prabhsimran Singh and Priyansh Arya’s runs dried up, catches started dropping like a hot potato and the entire season descended into beautiful chaos.

Now, usually, a normal team sees a corkscrew like this and tries to fix the cricket. Punjab decided to right the wrong.

But instead of doing the sensible thing like telling the players to delete their social media apps, take away their phones and get their heads back on the real sport, the Punjab management decided to go full “us against the world”. In fact, they have convinced themselves that they are victims. The story was, “Oh, we’re finally winning consistently, so everyone’s just jealous and out to get us.” It was a victim complex of epic, delusional proportions. Everyone in the camp just sat patting each other on the back and whispering, “we’re good, they’re bad.”

Eventually that inner delusion had to collide with the outer world and the crash was spectacular. It was so toxic that when they arrived in Dharamsala for the most critical press conference of the season, they didn’t even send a captain or a coach. They sent Andrew Leipus. Chief Physiotherapist.

Imagine being a journalist who has spent his own time and money on a trip to the mountains only to be confronted by a physio who legally and logically cannot answer a single cricket question. The media went berserk and honestly, can you blame them?

The backlash was such an avalanche that it forced Ricky Ponting, one of the biggest, most famous, toughest and most outspoken men in the history of cricket, to stand there and look reporters dead in the eye with a straight face.

Asked if the social media circus was ruining the team, Ponting claimed he had absolutely no idea what was going on online because he didn’t have social media.

VIDEO | Former Australian World Cup captain and Punjab Kings head coach Ricky Ponting on his thoughts on the off-field incidents and social media chatter surrounding the team.

“There were no things off the field that I had to worry about as a coach. We got it done.” pic.twitter.com/NqZQ1D5nMg— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) May 20, 2026

Look, even if we believe him for a second, it makes you wonder: shouldn’t someone have told him? Shouldn’t someone have tapped one of the wildest leaders in cricket history on the shoulder and said, “Hey Ricky, maybe we should confiscate the iPads before the season is completely ruined?”

What the Punjab Kings really needed to do was to simply turn off the noise and put on a show. Which they did in their very last game, funnily enough. But by then it was too late.

Frankly, the eerie silence on Sunday should have happened weeks ago. The management and coaching staff really should have stepped in and said, “Boys, enough is enough. It’s cricket first, social media later.” But unfortunately no one did.

So here we are. 14 matches, 15 points and about a hundred controversies later, one has to wonder, do Punjab Kings really think they have achieved anything this year? Are they really sitting back and proud of the casual color, bullying and condescending tweets they’ve been spewing out all season?

Maybe it’s time to look in the mirror, reflect a bit and try to do better next year. Both on the field and certainly off it.

– The end

Issued by:

Amar Panicker

Published on:

May 25, 2026 08:42 IST

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