Once Built on Experience, CSK Now Exposed by Inexperience

Fifty-odd for five used to mean something very specific at Chennai Super Kings. In 2018, Faf du Plessis played one of the great IPL innings to drag them out of a downward spiral — it looked terminal all the way through to the 18th over before, twelve balls later, they were in the final. Those escapes were possible because that CSK had grizzled, battle-hardened players who knew how to survive a crisis before detonating one.

At 51 for 5 in Guwahati on Monday, this brand-new CSK had no such answers. A squad assembled around exuberance and six-hitting, with six legitimate candidates for this season’s emerging player award, was sent packing by the boy who won it last season. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 15 years old, got to a fifty off 15 balls. Riyan Parag’s Rajasthan Royals won by a distance. And CSK, for the second successive year, were left asking questions of themselves that only results can answer.

The Pitch, the Rain, and a No-Brainer Toss Decision

It had rained in Guwahati for two days leading into the game and for half an hour before the toss. Ruturaj Gaikwad said at the coin-flip that bowling first was a no-brainer, and he was right — the red-soil pitch had extra carry, extra bounce, and moisture beneath the surface that made traditional good-length deliveries skid and seize unpredictably. What he could not have anticipated was just how badly it would go.

The conditions set things up perfectly for Jofra Archer and Nandre Burger. High release points, hard lengths, awkward bounce — it was everything a pace bowler wants and everything a batter who likes to swing from ball one does not. The first blow landed even before a delivery was sent down: Dewald Brevis, one of CSK’s key middle-order pillars, was ruled out with a side strain, a blow that magnified every fragility in the XI before the game even began.

CSK Innings: Six-Hitters on the Wrong Pitch

For the first two overs, Gaikwad and Sanju Samson — their two most experienced batters at the top — tried to get a read of what the ball was doing. They could not decipher it for long enough. When they eventually went after the bowling, both lost their stumps. “Chetta.” “Raja.” Gone.

Nineteen balls in, three wickets down, CSK deployed their Impact Player. Only once in IPL history has a team been forced to make that switch sooner. Sarfaraz Khan walked in but his bat failed the gauge test — too wide, a reminder of just how frantic things had become in the middle. CSK were 41 for 4 at the end of the powerplay. The top three had been undone inside 3.1 overs.

RR Quicks in the Powerplay — Lengths Breakdown

The numbers tell the story clearly. The good-length deliveries — 23 of them — yielded just 12 runs, two wickets, and a dot-ball percentage of 57.6. The surface made those lengths almost unplayable, and Archer and Burger exploited them to perfection. It didn’t matter that Archer had gone at 9.53 runs per over in the T20 World Cup or that Samson had taken him to the cleaners in their most recent encounter. On this pitch, on this night, there was no antidote.

Shivam Dube arrived at No. 7 and, unlike in 2025, chose to fight fire with fire. His stay lasted four balls. A 33-run last-wicket stand between MS Dhoni and a tail-ender — the highest ever for CSK for the 10th wicket — served only as a footnote. CSK were bowled out for 127. It was exactly the worst-case scenario of a batting line-up built for aggression and flat decks encountering conditions that demanded patience and craft it simply did not possess.

One bright spot in a dark evening: Kartik Sharma, one of five new players CSK fielded, showed he had something. He demonstrated the ability to rotate strike on the good ball and clear the rope on the bad one — in between overs, after he sent a long hop from Ravi Bishnoi sailing out of the park, Riyan Parag was waiting for him with a fist bump. That small moment of acknowledgement from the opposition said something.

CSK’s Batting Woes: Context From IPL 2025

The broader worry is not just Monday. CSK’s batting was statistically the worst of all ten teams in IPL 2025 across almost every meaningful parameter.

CSK Batting in IPL 2025 — How They Ranked

Bottom of the table across the board. That is why the squad was rebuilt so aggressively. The hope was that Samson, Mhatre, Gaikwad, Brevis, and Dube — a top five boasting the best collective average (35.85) and second-best collective strike rate (162.90) among all ten IPL 2026 squads — would address it structurally.

Top-Five Batting Stats by IPL 2026 Squad (Between IPL 2025 and IPL 2026)

The numbers back up the ambition of the rebuild. But they also underline the caveat: with no proven experience lower down the order, and with Brevis and MS Dhoni absent on Monday, there was nothing to fall back on when things went wrong.

RR Chase: Sooryavanshi Announces Himself

In the stands, amid a sea of CSK yellow, there were RR fans who had turned up wearing “Sooryavanshi” on their backs. They got their money’s worth.

All through CSK’s innings, the crowd at the Assam Cricket Association Stadium had been subdued. When RR came out to bat, the noise changed entirely. Sooryavanshi — 15 years old — played with the kind of fearlessness that cannot be coached. One shot in particular stood out: a cut for six off a bowler who had denied India passage to the 2019 World Cup final. Approximately 12,500 people reacted as if there were ten times as many. By the time he reached his 15-ball fifty, even CSK’s own supporters had abandoned resistance and given themselves over to the spectacle.

RR knocked off the target with minimal fuss. Parag’s young team, built around its own brand of youth and audacity, administered a lesson to CSK about what that same youth can look like when it has had time to grow into itself. RR are captained by a boy this franchise first signed when he was 17. The difference on Monday was that RR’s youth came equipped with experience of pressure moments and a settled team identity — things CSK’s new-look side are still developing.

What Does CSK Do Now?

“Look, I’m sure a few guys will say, in hindsight, maybe I could have played a bit differently,” batting coach Mike Hussey acknowledged after the game. “But on another day, it comes off and they change the momentum of the game. I don’t want our batsmen moving forward to have clouded thoughts or put doubts in their mind.“

Gaikwad, for his part, took the philosophical route. “You never know what is a good score. You just have to keep going. It’s one of those days where the wicket was on the tougher side.”

Both men have a point, and both men know the bigger picture doesn’t disappear because of one difficult pitch. CSK’s next two fixtures are against last year’s finalists. The challenge stiffens considerably from here.

The typical CSK player in 2026 is less grizzled mongrel and more doe-eyed starlet. That is by design, and it may yet pay off across a full season. But in Guwahati on Monday, this new CSK met a very old problem — adversity — and discovered they are not yet equipped to handle it the way the old teams could. That will change with time. It has to.

Read More: Smart Cricket, Brave Calls: How Royals Captain Riyan Parag Set Up CSK’s Collapse

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