From Champions to Bottom-Feeders: CSK's Fall from Grace

The one thing I have learned from my many years of watching sports, listening to shows, and reading articles is that there is no such thing as a great organization in all of sports. Players build organizations up, and a lack of players tears them down.

The Chicago Bulls, with Michael Jordan, were considered the pinnacle of sports, and yet once he departed, they haven't sniffed a championship. Bill Belichick's New England Patriots were considered the gold standard for team management for nearly two decades, but after Tom Brady departed, Belichick's system began to fall apart. Steinbrenner's Yankees were considered the hallmark of Baseball in the '90s and 2000s, but after the departure of Jeter and all their Hall of Famers, the Yankees haven't sniffed a World Series for 16 years now. The Chiefs have not changed the way they run their organization in years, but only after the emergence of Patrick Mahomes have they risen to be considered one of the best-run organizations in the NFL.

And now I'm watching it happen again, this time with the Chennai Super Kings.

The recent trade of Sam Curran and Ravindra Jadeja to the Rajasthan Royals for Sanju Samson is a panic move; a band-aid fix on an injury that requires surgery. Since the inception of the IPL, CSK has been hailed as one of the most stable and well-run franchises in the IPL, but the move seems more desperate than they are usually known for, given their reputation for calculated genius. Rather than trying to fix what has plagued this franchise since their 2023 championship, they are attempting to make sexy moves that make headlines but don't solve important, fundamental issues that are rotting the core of this team.

Let's rewind to 2023. CSK won the championship that year with what was, let's be honest, an aging roster. It was a beautiful swan song, the kind of story sports fans eat up. But anyone watching closely could see the clock ticking. The 2024 mini auction should have been their chance to acquire younger players, injecting some youth and energy into a team that desperately needed it. Instead, they stood pat. They didn't retool. They didn't prepare for the inevitable decline that comes with age.

The issues were glaring even then. CSK had no younger middle-order batsman who could take the pressure off Dhoni in the death overs. Jadeja's batting strike rate had been declining for a long time, so he wasn't the answer. Dube was supposed to fill that void, but his struggles against extreme pace made him unreliable when CSK needed him most. They needed someone who could come in at number five or six and finish games, someone who could hit boundaries at will in those final overs. They never found that person.

Their spending spree didn't help either. The splurge for Daryl Mitchell in 2024 was a disaster. Way too expensive for what he produced. Same story with Shardul Thakur, a CSK veteran they brought back hoping he could recapture some of that old magic. He couldn't. These were expensive mistakes, the kind that championship-caliber teams aren't supposed to make.

Now, to be fair, injuries absolutely devastated CSK in 2024. Devon Conway went down. Matheesha Pathirana, one of their most exciting young talents, got hurt. Mustafizur Rahman had to leave early for international duties. They got nothing from Deepak Chahar. Jadeja was a ghost. Their backups provided zero production. You could argue that 2024 was a lost season because of circumstances beyond their control, and there's some truth to that. But great organizations don't just shrug their shoulders when injuries hit. They have depth. They have contingency plans. CSK didn't.

Then came the 2025 Mega Auction, the biggest reset in IPL history. Teams could retain only up to six of their 25 players, with everyone else going back into the pool. This was CSK's chance to completely overhaul their squad, to get younger, to build something sustainable for the next three years. At the start of 2024, I wrote in one of my blogs that CSK should retain Gaikwad, Pathirana, Deshpande, and Dube, with the possible addition of Dhoni if they wanted to keep him around for his leadership. CSK followed that guideline pretty closely. They retained five players: Gaikwad, Pathirana, Dube, Jadeja, and Dhoni.

And therein lies their biggest mistake. Retaining Ravindra Jadeja for 18 crore.

Look, I understand the sentimentality. Jadeja has been with CSK forever. He's a legend in yellow. But 18 crore for a player whose batting has declined, whose bowling hasn't been the same, and who's now on the wrong side of 30? That's not smart business. That's nostalgia clouding judgment. That's the kind of decision that gets teams in trouble.

It didn't stop there. CSK spent 9.75 crore on Ravi Ashwin, another beloved former player. But Ashwin was clearly past his prime. In the four years before this auction, he had taken only 42 wickets in T20 cricket. That's not the production you want from a nearly 10 crore investment. Again, this felt like a move driven by emotion rather than logic, by history rather than reality.

And then there's the middle order. CSK still didn't address their desperate need for an established Indian batsman who could anchor that middle order and finish games. They added Deepak Hooda, Rahul Tripathi, and Vijay Shankar. None of those guys is what CSK needed. Hooda has been inconsistent his entire career. Tripathi is streaky at best. Shankar has never lived up to his potential. These were stopgap measures, not solutions.

All of this brings us to their expected release list for 2025, which only adds to the confusion. CSK are set to release Devon Conway, Rachin Ravindra, Rahul Tripathi, Deepak Hooda, Vijay Shankar, Jamie Overton, and Mathees Pathirana. I agree with letting Overton, Tripathi, Hooda, and Shankar go. That part makes sense. But the decisions around Conway and Rachin are difficult to understand.

Conway had a down year, but he also has a strong IPL track record. He scored 900+ runs in only 23 matches between 2022 and 2023. That is elite production. CSK may believe that he has lost his touch, or they may plan to buy him back at a cheaper price, but even with that possibility in mind, this move still feels strange.

The decision to release Rachin Ravindra is even more puzzling. He is relatively young, just twenty-five, and he is a very cheap overseas opener who could potentially anchor their top order for a decade or more. Consider what Brendon McCullum and Dwayne Smith meant to CSK during the mid-2010s. Ravindra could have that same kind of upside. Sure, the numbers haven't been great. Sure, he hasn't shown an ability to be a reliable T20 batsman yet. But he can play explosive innings in the IPL and has enough raw talent to turn into exactly the type of player CSK should be building around. It feels too soon to move on from him.

The most surprising decision of all may be the decision to cut Matheesha Pathirana. Sure, 2025 was by far his worst year from an economy rate stance, giving 10.14 runs per over; not great for your premier death bowler. But he still managed to take 13 wickets in 12 games, even in a "down" year. Considering he has taken 45 wickets in 30 matches during his last three years in the IPL, that is not the kind of production teams generally give up on. 

His injuries are the main concern, and they are valid, but they are also manageable. What you cannot easily manage or replace is someone who can bowl at the death the way he does. His ability to nail yorkers while bowling at high pace is not a skill you find often, and it is definitely not something you find cheaply at a mini auction.

Releasing a player you retained for 13 crore is a serious risk. CSK is betting heavily on the idea that they can replace him, but the problem is that they do not have the depth in their pace attack to take a gamble like this, especially in a mini auction. If the market does not fall their way, they might end up spending the entire season trying to replace a player they already had. 

And after all these moves, CSK is releasing players worth roughly 29 crore from the last auction. 29 crore gone in one year, which is more than half of what they walked into the auction with. That is the picture of an organization that spent recklessly and is now scrambling to correct course.

This is what happens when teams chase their past instead of building for their future. CSK won in 2023, and instead of recognizing that title for what it was, a perfect alignment of veteran intelligence and timely performances, they convinced themselves they could run it back. They tried to squeeze more out of players who no longer had more to give. And now they are trading away pieces in a last attempt to stay relevant, bringing in Sanju Samson as if he can single-handedly rescue a team whose real issues run far deeper.

CSK will enter the 2026 auction with nearly 44 crores and try to revamp their squad. Whether they can nail their buys will decide their fate until the next mega auction, especially because of their advantage over the rest of the field cap-wise (except KKR). Only time will tell if CSK made the right decisions, but in the short term, the outcome does not seem very promising.