New Delhi: Chennai Super Kings (CSK) head coach Stephen Fleming said that there has been no home advantage for them playing at Chepauk and that the team hasn’t been able to read the Chepauk pitch in recent years. The track that is supposed to help spinners at large showcased contrary characteristics when it helped the seamers more as Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar claimed combined figures of 7-0-41-4 on Friday.
The duo shut down CSK in their chase of 197 runs and delivered a second consecutive win to RCB and the biggest home defeat to CSK. During the IPL 2025 mega-auction, CSK stacked their squad with spin, which was of no avail in their second fixture of the season.
“Well, as we’ve been telling you for a number of years, there was no home advantage at Chepauk. We’ve won away from home a couple of times. And we haven’t been able to read… we’ve been really honest with you. We haven’t been able to read the wickets here in the last couple of years. So, it’s not new,” Fleming said at the post-match press conference, as quoted by ESPNcricinfo.
In IPL 2024, the Chepauk pitches didn’t assist spinners, a traditional strength of CSK. It might come as a surprise, but the pacers picked up 74 wickets while the spinners claimed only 25 wickets at the venue in the last season. Fleming said they just can’t go and play four spinners in today’s Chepauk and that the team is working hard to try and understand the nature of these pitches.
Fleming hoped for the dew to settle in so the batters could extract some advantage, but this didn’t turn out to be the case, and to add to CSK’s misery, the surface got even slower during their chase, and they ended up losing by 50 runs.
“It’s so hard to read, but we thought it was going to skid on with the dew, but it actually got a bit tacky. So, it certainly made it harder here,” Fleming added.
Don’t discount us – Fleming
Unlike other IPL teams, the CSK batters don’t usually swing from the get-go. The fact became a talking point as the chase went wrong, but according to Fleming, this doesn’t make them a bad team. During the presser, a usually calm Fleming had a kind of testy chat with a journalist who had asked him if “this (batting approach) was his way of playing cricket.”
It didn’t go too well with the former Kiwi player, who said, “We have firepower all the way through. Just because we don’t swing from ball one and have a little bit of luck go away, we’ll see at the end. Just see at the end who wins it. It’s a positive brand of cricket, no doubt about it, but don’t discount us.”
Chennai Super Kings were thumped by Royal Challengers Bengaluru in their Chepauk fortress on Friday and head coach Stephen Fleming admitted that they haven’t been able to read the wickets at home in recent years. Cricket Sports News: Latest Cricket News, Cricket Live Score, Sports Breaking News from Sports Today
