To be fair, Stephen Fleming’s unusual post-match meltdown in the aftermath of Chennai Super Kings’ defeat to Royal Challengers Bengaluru at Chepauk on Friday is not indefensible. There was a lot for the CSK head coach to be upset about. Also, picking the ‘home advantage’ thing didn’t offer an oddity. Fleming is the last person to throw his players under the bus in public.
Allowing RCB to hand CSK their biggest-ever home defeat was never fun. And maybe, Fleming is apprehensive about the fact that after a fallow 2024 season, this year, too, is not going to be the annus mirabilis if CSK spinners get tonked on their home patch. Pitch had to be the easy target. From Eden Gardens to Chepauk, the IPL this term appears to be caught in the ‘home advantage’ quagmire.
“Well, as we have been telling you for a number of years, there was no home advantage at Chepauk,” Fleming rattled off at the post-match press conference. “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 discourse didn’t exactly fit into the cosy CSK narrative. This is a franchise, where the think-tank – Fleming, MS Dhoni and now the new captain Ruturaj Gaikwad – trusts the process rather than the results. Then again, Fleming had a point. The Chepauk pitches didn’t help the spinners much last year also – with the fast bowlers claiming 74 wickets and the tweakers accounting for only 25.
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“This is not the Chepauk (of old), where you can just go in and play four spinners,” said Fleming. “We are having to work really hard to try and understand what the nature of each pitch is, and it’s quite different.”
This, though, begs the question – did CSK management err by not changing their auction template? The squad has an overload of spinners. Also, the acquisitions of the likes of Rahul Tripathi and Deepak Hooda are bound to raise legitimate questions. Fleming defended his team’s batting approach, saying: “We have firepower all the way through.”
In fact, a question related to CSK’s slow burn, batting-wise, seemed to have irked him. “I don’t understand the question,” the head coach parped. “Just because we don’t swing from ball one and have a little bit of luck go away… We will see at the end.”
Still early days in the 2025 IPL, but ‘home advantage’ has already become the popular catchphrase of the tournament. Ajinkya Rahane, the Kolkata Knight Riders captain, set the ball rolling by asking for a little more turn on the Eden pitch. Eden curator Sujan Mukherjee’s response to RevSportz became a subject of national debate. Now, Fleming has taken the matter to Chepauk.
P. S. The BCCI rules and regulations for the preparation of the pitches state: “The Franchise and players shall not have any say in the preparation of the wicket.”
Also Read: Not the Thala we know – The MS Dhoni puzzle of batting at No. 9