Toppers Sunrisers will have to be at their best to deny Super Kings direct entry to title clash
"Your franchise pays so much money for you, you should at least make the semifinals. After that, you can say it is a lottery."
--MS Dhoni, after guiding Chennai Super Kings to the 2010 IPL play-offs
It seems Mahendra Singh Dhoni takes his words a tad too seriously.
There, perhaps, can be no other explanation to Chennai Super Kings (CSK), the team Dhoni has captained since its inception, making it to the play-offs in every single season that the franchise has been a part of in the IPL.
And, as the former India captain leads his troops into another play-off match against the Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) in the IPL-11 Qualifier 1 at the Wankhede here on Tuesday, there's bound to be a feeling of 'been there, done that' among the Yellow Brigade.
CSK have been twice champions, four-time runners-up and twice semifinalists in the eight seasons they were part of before the franchise was suspended for two years due to the IPL spot-fixing scandal.
A lot of water has flown under the cash-rich cricket league's bridge over those two years, and yet, the tide seems to be still as ever while riding a CSK ship.
Dhoni is Captain Cool again, Suresh Raina is Run Machine again, Dwayne Bravo is Mr Entertainment again, Stephen Fleming is Master Tactician again.
It's almost as if their two-year hiatus never existed, and CSK merely pressed the pause and play buttons.
They've re-entered the IPL world with the same winning mentality, coming out trumps in nine of their 14 league games to finish second in the points table behind SRH.
One of the biggest factors behind that has been CSK's faith in their old core group. The franchise retained and purchased some of its oldest faces in the auction, the likes of Dhoni, Raina, Ravindra Jadeja, Bravo, Faf du Plessis and Murali Vijay.
Once the foundation was laid, the holes had to be plugged. Ambati Rayudu was chosen as their Indian batting mainstay, Shane Watson the all-rounder, Deepak Chahar, Shardul Thakur and Lungi Ngidi their fast bowling weapons, and Harbhajan Singh a like-for-like replacement of Ravichandran Ashwin.
It was dubbed by many critics as 'Dad's Army', but the same 'Dad's Army' has ever-so-calmly brushed aside all youthful outfits brimming with exuberance throughout the league phase, beating every team at least once, and their Qualifier 1 opponents in both their league encounters.
SRH couldn't have asked for a more daunting challenge in the quest to enter their second IPL final than CSK, more so since they're coming off a three-match losing streak.
That the Orange Army ended atop the points table despite that is credit to their bowling unit, which defended totals as if its life depended on it in the initial stages of the league, as well as the form of captain Kane Williamson who forged match-winning partnerships with Shikhar Dhawan at the top.
But once that bowling unit went off the boil a little bit, their batting line-up, and particularly the middle-order, was left terribly exposed.
Thus, if SRH are to have any chance of pulling off an upset, their quality bowling attack led by Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Rashid Khan will have to keep the mighty CSK batsmen under check, and then hope that their misfiring batting gets the better of the opposition's weakened bowling.
And yet, it still might not be enough to stop the 'Dad's Army'.
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