Chennai Super Kings (CSK) head coach Stephen Fleming has admitted that his team has been struggling to decode the conditions at Chepauk in recent years. His remarks came after CSK suffered a crushing 50-run loss to Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) in IPL 2025.
Despite assembling a spin-heavy squad at the auction, CSK found themselves at a disadvantage on a pitch that favored seam bowling. RCB pacers Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar capitalized on the conditions, delivering a combined spell of 7-0-41-4 that dismantled CSK’s chase of 197.
Fleming expressed the team’s ongoing difficulties in adapting to the unpredictable Chepauk surface, stating, “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. We are trying to come to grips each day with what we get, and we don’t know.”
The once spin-friendly Chepauk pitch has undergone a drastic transformation in character. In IPL 2024, pacers took 74 wickets at the venue, while spinners managed just 25. Despite CSK’s efforts to build a squad suited for spin-friendly conditions, the pitch has not aligned with their traditional strengths.
Acknowledging the shift, Stephen Fleming admitted, “It’s not the Chepauk [of old] where you can just go in and play four spinners. We’re having to work really hard to try and understand what the nature of each pitch is, and it’s quite different.”
CSK had hoped that dew in the second innings would work in their favor during the chase, but instead, the surface became slower, making stroke play more difficult. Reflecting on the miscalculation, Fleming conceded, “No, we didn’t get it right. 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 also denied the claims as per which the CSK team lacked firepower.
