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IPL 2026 will start on March 28 and among the ten teams getting ready for the biggest season in the tournament's history one franchise carries a storyline that nobody in Indian cricket is ignoring. Chennai Super Kings finished bottom of the table in IPL 2025. Last place. Tenth out of ten. For most franchises that would simply be a bad season to move on from and try to do better next year. For CSK it is not that simple because Chennai have a history and the history is sitting right there for anyone who wants to look at it. They have been here before. Twice. And both times what came next was a title.
2020 to 2021: Dad's army proves everyone wrong
The 2020 season was the lowest Chennai had ever been. They played the tournament in the UAE because of the pandemic and finished seventh out of eight teams, missing the playoffs for the first time since they entered the competition. The criticism that came their way was not gentle. MS Dhoni looked a shadow of the player who had won them three titles. The squad was old, the cricket was slow and the phrase that kept coming up in every article written about them was Dad's Army. Most people looking at that team in late 2020 thought the Dhoni era was winding down and that Chennai needed to think seriously about what came next.
What came next was Ruturaj Gaikwad winning the Orange Cap, CSK finishing second in the league stage and then beating KKR in the final to lift their fourth IPL title. The same team that had been called too old and too slow twelve months earlier came back and won everything. The people who had written them off in the UAE did not have a clean explanation for how it happened. CSK rarely give you one.
2022 to 2023: Ravindra Jadeja's last two balls for CSK
The 2022 season was worse than 2020 in almost every way. CSK finished ninth out of ten teams with only four wins from fourteen games. It was the lowest finish in the franchise's history and the season had been unsettled from the start. Ravindra Jadeja was handed the captaincy before the tournament began, struggled with the weight of it, handed it back to Dhoni midway through and the whole episode left the dressing room in a state that showed up clearly in the results. Four wins. Ninth place. A season that most CSK fans would rather forget.
The 2023 final against Gujarat Titans at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad went to the last two balls with CSK needing six runs to win. Ravindra Jadeja walked up and hit a four off the penultimate ball and then a six off the final delivery. The same player whose captaincy had been part of the story of 2022 hit the runs that won CSK their fifth title and matched Mumbai Indians' record. It was one of the most dramatic endings the IPL has produced and it came from a team that had finished ninth the previous year and been given very little chance of doing anything meaningful twelve months later.
2025 to 2026: The hat-trick nobody wants to bet against
CSK finished tenth in IPL 2025. Last place. Bottom of the table. The same position they were in before 2021 and before 2023 and on both of those occasions the year that followed ended with a trophy. That is the pattern and it is not something CSK fans are keeping to themselves ahead of March 28.
The squad has been reshaped through the mega-auction. Sanju Samson will arrive fresh from winning the T20 World Cup Player of the Tournament award in Ahmedabad, one of the most in-form batters in world cricket walking into a franchise that knows how to use players at their peak. Prashant Veer and Kartik Sharma will bring youth and energy to a group that has always mixed experience with emerging talent better than most. The pieces look different from 2025 and that is the point.
Two data points do not make a rule. Nobody can say with certainty that the pattern holds a third time. But CSK have spent the last six years making believers out of people who thought they were finished and the sceptics are already finding it harder than they expected to look at 2025 and not think about 2020 and 2022. They finished bottom and won it. They finished bottom and won it again. They have finished bottom again. The sentence has written itself twice before and CSK are the only ones who know whether it is about to do it a third time.
