There is a big silly smile on MS Dhoni‘s face. For a second, it becomes easy to imagine him not as a world-famous finisher or a World Cup-winning captain but as a kid, because he had just done something that kids take great pride in. Being sneaky little devils.
Virat Kohli had set up for the late cut. This was the season where he almost scored a thousand runs. So once he had decided on a shot, it had no choice but to fly away to the boundary. He waited until the ball passed him, to make sure he could hit it nice and fine. And he did, except Dhoni just stuck his right leg up in the air and stopped the ball dead in its tracks.
That technique isn’t in any wicketkeeping manual. Neither is the one he uses to pull off those lightning-fast stumpings, where his hands collect the ball and crash into the stumps without any give. But they have always been his. He saw the sense in them. Even if nobody else did.
The other man involved in that sequence of events from 2016 was R Ashwin. He, too, is known for resorting to funventions. Changing his action. His grip. Flicking it using just one finger and making it spin the wrong way. Cutting his fingers under the ball instead of over it so that it doesn’t spin at all. The modest offbreak was becoming irrelevant. Ashwin was loath to letting himself go the same way and the reward for such perseverance was the respect he was given. Kohli scored only six runs in ten balls off him.
That was the last season of the Dhoni-Ashwin partnership in the IPL. It has taken eight years for fate to put them back together. These freethinkers wouldn’t be constrained by what had come before them. They preferred to test what was true by themselves. Are yorkers really that hard to score off? What if I meet them with a whirl of my wrists? Are spin bowlers really a bad option in the first six overs? Why don’t we find out? In the final. When we go up against Chris Gayle. Of all the peak CSK moments in IPL history, there aren’t many that can match how they came up against a team whose owners were openly laughing at them for spending US$850,000 on a guy who had picked up just 15 wickets in 14 matches, only to watch in horror as he beat them to win the title.
During Ashwin’s time with CSK, 15 players bowled at least 500 balls in the powerplay. He is the only spinner on that list and is tied for the third-most wickets.
The IPL in 2025 is virtually a different sport to what these two knew when they played together, and it has resulted in much changed roles for both of them. Dhoni, 43, and playing no other cricket besides this, has stripped his game down to its barest essential. Six-hitting. CSK’s net bowlers, having been excused for the day, had lined up by the boundary to watch him do his thing, their eyes tracing the path of the ball as he sent it soaring into the night sky. He faced only throwdowns in the lead-up to Sunday’s game, but he did play a full part in CSK’s two practice matches ahead of the season, where clips of him getting caught off Matheesha Pathirana’s bowling and helicoptering him for a six straight down the ground have gone viral. The average Dhoni innings over the last two years has lasted less than six balls but there is so much contained within each of them because they come with a ticking clock.
Ashwin is retired from international cricket, too, but he believes he has more in him. Years, in fact, now that he is back where it all began. At practice a couple of days ago, he wheeled out some of his greatest hits, including the old pause-and-deliver. He is bringing back his crouched batting stance as well, which he put to good use at Rajasthan Royals when they sent him up the order to offer their finishers a better entry point.
In his first season with CSK, Ashwin was caught in traffic and tried to get the people ahead of him to give way by telling them he had to get to the game. But they didn’t recognise him. Worse, they thought he was a nuisance. When he had success here as an opposition player – seven wickets in three IPL games at an economy rate of 6.91 and an average of 11.85 – he was met with indifference. But in 2021, when he scored his first Test century at Chepauk, after picking up a five-wicket haul, the crowd was so hyped for him that they started cheering for everything he did. “Every time I bowled or removed my cap there was a different feeling [because of the cheers],” he said.
Usually, the biggest roar of the night in CSK’s home games has always been reserved for one man. On Sunday, there’s a chance he might have a little competition.
