Five consecutive losses since their opening match win have left Chennai Super Kings reeling close to the bottom of the table. The five-time champions have found themselves suffering toothless defeat after defeat, with their latest loss against Kolkata Knight Riders seeing them put on their lowest ever score at their home ground at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chepauk.
Many will be wondering where CSK go from here, with their playoff hopes looking more and more unlikely as the tournament wears on. However, the season isn’t quite over yet. CSK don’t have to look too far into the past to find evidence of how IPL teams can dig themselves out of such a hole early in the season.
There have been a handful of IPL teams who have been able to hit winning streaks in the second half of the season to reignite their title hopes after a bad start. Most recently, CSK found themselves on the wrong end of one such run, as the 2024 Royal Challengers Bengaluru started with only one win from their first eight games.
They then went on a massive six-game winning streak, starting off with a win against the dominant SRH, back-to-back wins over Gujarat Titans, a massive beatdown of Punjab Kings, before essentially eliminating their fellow playoff hopefuls Delhi Capitals. Finally, they beat CSK themselves in the last match of the regular season, in what was a virtual quarterfinal matchn to reach the playoffs.
{{/usCountry}}They then went on a massive six-game winning streak, starting off with a win against the dominant SRH, back-to-back wins over Gujarat Titans, a massive beatdown of Punjab Kings, before essentially eliminating their fellow playoff hopefuls Delhi Capitals. Finally, they beat CSK themselves in the last match of the regular season, in what was a virtual quarterfinal matchn to reach the playoffs.
{{/usCountry}}“I had packed my bags in April itself, thinking there was no chance of us qualifying,” Virat Kohli had said to JioCinema about RCB's late-season miracle. "See where we are standing now. It is amazing how this game can turn, and what is the explanation for that? There is no explanation." CSK must be feeling much the same way — can they dig deep and produce a similar response?
Can captain Dhoni turn back the clock for inspiration?
Over the IPL’s history, it has typically required seven wins to give a team a solid chance of qualifying, while 8 wins is all but a guarantee of going through to the playoffs. A team that has reached 8 wins has never missed the playoffs in IPL history, outside of the two seasons where teams played 16 matches. Only once has a team reached the playoffs with a six-win season (SRH in IPL 2019, qualifying fourth despite a losing 6-8 record in the regular season.)
CSK now have a theoretical cap on nine wins in the IPL 2025 season, but they still have the wiggle room to drop another match or two. Only winning seven matches remains risky: 20 different teams have reached 7 wins and failed to qualify for the playoffs in this 15-season sample. Only 12 have failed to qualify, good for a strike-rate of just 37.5% if you reach seven wins. This includes last season, in which four different teams finished with seven wins and seven losses. Only RCB qualified from this group, the rest agonisingly missing out.
If CSK want some inspiration, they should look back to their first title triumph, all the way back in 2010. Some forget that CSK started that season off with a record of 2-5, just four points from the first half of the season. They bounced back by making the most of a three-game stretch at home, putting together a hat-trick of wins to make it 5-5. They lost two more matches from there, but pulled off a victory in the final match of the season against Kings XI Punjab, when they needed it most.
They needed 16 off the last over to win that match. Who else to come through in the clutch, hitting two consecutive sixes to wrap up the win? MS Dhoni produced a moment of magic that led to him calling it one of the most emotional matches of his career, then at 28-years-old. Fifteen years on, and with the captaincy again, can he inspire the same kind of magic?