Chennai Super Kings are all but out of playoff contention this season, and coach Stephen Fleming hasn’t shied away from acknowledging the mistakes CSK made throughout the season, as well as during the auction. CSK have lost seven out of their nine games, and a five-wicket defeat at the hands of Sunrisers Hyderabad only added insult to their injury.
“It’s hard to argue that we got everything right,” Fleming said after CSK failed to defend 154 on a sluggish Chepauk surface, losing their first-ever home game against SRH.
“And it is not easy. And that is why we are proud of our record today. We have been able to be consistent for so long, and it doesn’t take much for it to go another way. Other teams have gotten better, and that is the point of the auction. But we just haven’t been able to get it right.”
For a team that was constructed on the cornerstone of consistency, CSK have lurked nowhere near it this season. They have used 21 players of their 27-man squad, all in a bid to find the right combination and end the misery. None, however, was successful in bringing the stability that CSK have triumphed on for more than ten years.
“So you take responsibility from the top down and then you just ask a little more of the players,” CSK’s coach said. “But yeah, that has to be an area where we need to reflect and say it wasn’t as good as what it could have been, or it hasn’t worked out how we wanted.”
Like many things, CSK turning desperately to players to do a job unnatural to them hasn’t been quite like them. Rather than throwing the youngsters bare-bodied to the wolves, CSK’s seniors nurtured them under their wings over the past years. And that would only have been possible with a perfectly tailored squad, which CSK failed to gather in the auction.
He was also candid about the side’s chaos within. According to him, the think tank drained itself trying to find the solution that really wasn’t there. And he didn’t hesitate to place the blame on himself.
“It is also not perfect science,” Fleming said. “The auction is a very fluid beast. It’s like buying [for] 25 hours and seeing it come away at the end of it mentally and sometimes physically exhausted. And to be fair, I still think we have got a good squad. We are not far away.”
“A couple of key injuries, just a bit of a lack of form. And we have just struggled really to nail a game plan. We’ve chopped and changed too much. I think it was trying to look for something that perhaps we felt wasn’t there. So yeah, there is a lot of responsibility and soul-searching, and it certainly starts with me at the top, 100%.”
CSK have been on the receiving end of criticism for their loyalty to experience, which has led to outdated approaches like “start slow, finish strong” being embedded in the team to harmful extents.
“I’m a believer that the game hasn’t evolved that much,” Fleming said. “So just trying to be smart and trying to be positive and give evidence that percentages still work. But all around there is a bit of chaos, isn’t there, with teams playing well [by targeting boundaries and playing high-risk shots]. And I think I said it in a grumpy interview a few weeks ago that we’ll see towards the end of the tournament which team will come through.”
But Fleming didn’t seem too firm on staying with this approach for long, especially when he had seen the opposite strategy bring better results with other teams.
“And it’s an intriguing watch to see settled sides and teams with a younger sort of flair battling it out and watching the cream rise. And I will watch with interest to see towards the end what the highest run-scorers are and what teams are doing well, because that’s part of the reflection as you move forward.”
Despite the defeats piling up around them, Chennai’s fans have not abandoned their team. In the game against SRH, the crowd was CSK’s twelfth man, hyping them up for every dot ball and going dead silent on any of SRH’s attempts to clear the boundary. Fleming, however, is aware of the weight of this loyalty.
“Well, we are aware of the support and it is not just at home; it extends throughout India,” Fleming said. “We understand the effect that MS Dhoni has with our support, but when we see the amount of yellow that turns up game after game, certainly here at Chepauk, but when we are around the country experiencing that, there is a responsibility that we feel, and it is a heavy one. And to not reward that with performances weighs very heavily on the group.”
