By Prakash Nair 
Chennai, May 10: Nobody really expected Ruturaj Gaikwad to think too hard at the toss today. He won it, he bowled. Simple as that. The MA Chidambaram Stadium pitch in May tells you what to do without you having to ask. It is dry, it is slow, and there is not a single cloud doing anything useful in the Chennai sky right now. Any captain with a spinner or two in his side would have made the same call.
But here is the thing. Winning the toss is the easy part.
Chennai Super Kings need to actually win this cricket match. They need it badly. Six games into the second half of the league stage and CSK are sitting sixth on the table, still on the outside looking in when it comes to the playoffs. Lucknow Super Giants are the team standing in front of them today and honestly, on any other day, you would circle this as a comfortable home win. LSG are tenth. Dead last. They have won three games all season.
Except cricket does not really work that way, does it.
Samson Carried Them Last Time. Again.
Go back to Tuesday in Delhi. Sanju Samson walked out to open the batting and by the time he was done, the match was over. Delhi Capitals had made 155 for 7, which was a decent enough total on that surface, and Samson just took it apart. 87 not out, 52 balls, finished the game with 15 balls still sitting in the pocket. Looked like he was playing in a park with his mates rather than a high-pressure IPL fixture.
The guy is in absolutely ridiculous form right now. 402 runs in ten games this season. Average of 57 and change. Two centuries already for a franchise he only joined this year. When he is at the crease and settled, CSK simply look like a different team from the one that lost their first three matches and had everyone writing their obituary.
Gaikwad had a quiet one against DC, did not fire, but by then it did not matter because Samson had already made the chase look routine. Young Kartik Sharma played a nice little innings, 41 off 30, held the middle together without fuss. Good sign for CSK that someone other than Samson can contribute.
One worry though. Anshul Kamboj was hit for 49 runs in four overs. His last over cost 20. LSG’s batters will have clocked that.
Three wins from the last four games. That is the run CSK are on right now. Not perfect, not clinical, but enough to keep themselves alive. That is all they needed.
LSG Won One Game and Suddenly Everyone Calmed Down
Lucknow Super Giants came into this match off the back of breaking a six-game losing streak against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on Thursday. Six straight losses. In a fourteen-match league stage that is basically a death sentence, and yet here they are, still technically alive, still turning up, still somehow carrying hope into a Sunday afternoon in Chennai.
The win over RCB happened mainly because Mitchell Marsh was absolutely unstoppable for about 17 overs. He made 111, got to his fifty before the sixth over was even done, and turned what could have been another forgettable LSG evening into a highlight reel. It was the kind of innings that reminds you why franchise cricket pays these overseas players the big money. When Marsh is in that mood, it does not matter what the pitch does or what the bowlers are trying.
Then rain came, DLS got involved, LSG squeezed a nine-run win, and everyone breathed again.
That said, let us not get carried away. One win off the back of a Marsh century against a DLS target is one win. LSG are still at the bottom. Their batters outside of Marsh have been woeful for most of this season. Rishabh Pant has barely got going. Nicholas Pooran, who was supposed to be this explosive middle-order presence, has been inconsistent at best. And now coming into today, three of their key players including Josh Inglis, Mohsin Khan and Avesh Khan are carrying fitness concerns after sitting out the last game. Nobody is quite sure who is playing until the team sheet comes out.
If Inglis does not play, a youngster called Arshin Kulkarni opens instead. Nothing against Kulkarni, but that is a significant drop in experience at the top.
What Chepauk Does to a Cricket Match
Here is something people outside Chennai do not always fully appreciate. Playing a day game at the Chepauk in the middle of May is genuinely brutal. The heat is somewhere around 33 to 40 degrees Celsius depending on the hour. The outfield feels like it is sitting under a grill. And the pitch, already dry and offering the spinners a fair bit of turn, does not get any better as the afternoon goes on.
More importantly, there is no dew tonight because this match finishes well before evening. In most T20 games, dew after sunset softens the surface and makes it easier to bat second. Spinners lose their grip, the ball skids through, the chasing side gets a natural advantage. None of that is available here today. Whoever bats second is doing it on the same difficult surface in the same difficult conditions with no help from the weather whatsoever.
That suits Noor Ahmad and Akeal Hosein perfectly. These two have been CSK’s most reliable match-winners with the ball this season and on a dry Chepauk surface with a second innings still to bowl, they are going to be a handful.
LSG have also never chased down a target against CSK at this ground. Not in any game between these two sides at Chepauk. That is a small stat but it sits in the back of the mind.
The Two Battles Inside the Bigger Battle
Keep your eye on two things in this match.
First one: can CSK get Mitchell Marsh out cheaply. He is LSG’s best player by a distance this season, 367 runs, and he destroyed the best bowling attack in the competition three days ago. If he gets in and gets going on a surface he seems to enjoy, LSG will post something threatening. If CSK’s pace attack, led by Mukesh Choudhary and Gurjapneet Singh, can nick him off early, the rest of LSG’s batting is genuinely fragile.
Second one: can LSG do to Sanju Samson what almost nobody has managed all season. Prince Yadav, who has taken 16 wickets in 10 games and is one of the more exciting young fast bowlers in this tournament, and Mohammed Shami, with all his experience and craft, will know exactly what the gameplan has to be. Get Samson in the first six overs. Because the record says this: when Samson has batted through the powerplay, CSK have won four out of four games. When he has not, they have won once from six tries. He is that important to how this team functions.
The Dhoni Question That Refuses to Leave
Every time CSK play at home, someone asks. Every single time. Is MS Dhoni going to be in the playing eleven today.
He has not played a single match this entire IPL season. A calf problem picked up before the tournament began has kept him on the sidelines throughout. He has been training. He has been seen in the nets. But training and actually taking the field in a competitive match with playoff implications are very different things when you are 44 years old and your body is making decisions your mind would rather not accept.
Four league games remain for CSK if they win today. Maybe three if they do not. This is genuinely running out of time, not just for the season, but potentially for Dhoni as a professional cricketer full stop.
The Chepauk crowd will chant his name regardless. They always do. Whether he runs out of that tunnel today is something the CSK management is going to have to weigh against what actually wins the game. Sentiment and strategy do not always point in the same direction.
What Today Really Comes Down To
This is a must-win for CSK in spirit if not in absolute mathematical terms. Lose to the bottom-placed side at home and suddenly those last three games become an uphill chase just to finish in the top four. Win and the momentum carries, the confidence carries, and the hunt stays very much alive.
For LSG there is not much left to fight for in terms of the tournament itself. But back-to-back wins, the second one away from home against a better-placed side, would at least send a message that this squad has some backbone. It does not save the season. It just makes the long bus ride back to Lucknow a little less silent.
Conditions favour CSK. The toss has gone their way. The form is with them. The surface is built for their bowlers. If they play anywhere close to their best today, this should be wrapped up before sunset.
The word should is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Let us see if CSK make it easy.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
