CSK IPL 2026 Batting Review — By the Numbers & Charts (Part 1)

Let's rip the plaster off straight away: CSK finished 8th in IPL 2026 — 6 wins, 8 losses from 14 league games — and did not make the playoffs. There, I said it. Supporting this team is a cardiology experiment at the best of times, and 2026 was the year the experiment got a little out of hand. If you feel like you aged ten years watching it — same.

If you want the whole season in one gloriously silly pattern, here it is: CSK opened with a hat-trick of defeats, found a hat-trick of wins in the middle to get everyone's hopes dangerously up, and then signed off with another hat-trick of defeats. Three threes. Even our heartbreak had a sense of rhythm.

But "we were bad" is a vibe, not an analysis. So before we cry about the bowling in Part 2, let's do the grown-up thing and actually look at the batting — who scored, where the runs dried up, and how far behind the four teams that did make the playoffs we really were.

How it started: the biggest trade and buy in CSK history

To understand 2026, you have to remember 2025 — because it was a horror show. CSK finished dead last, 10th, with just 4 wins from 14, comfortably one of the worst campaigns in their history. So the 2026 rebuild wasn't a vanity project; it was a bounce-back mission by a proud franchise that had just been humbled.

And the mood, before a ball was bowled, was actually electric. CSK pulled off the biggest trade in their history — sending Ravindra Jadeja and Sam Curran to Rajasthan Royals to bring in Sanju Samson. For a franchise famous for loyalty and continuity, moving a one-club legend like Jadeja was seismic. The plan was bold and clear: slot Samson straight to the top of the order and let him open.

And the timing felt perfect. Samson arrived on the back of a sensational T20 World Cup, where back-to-back Player-of-the-Match, match-winning knocks for India had him looking like the most destructive opener on the planet. CSK weren't buying a name — they were buying that form, and the dream was simple: Samson detonating in the powerplay, every single game.

For what it's worth, that part of the gamble largely worked — he ended up CSK's top scorer by a distance. The problem, as we'll see, was everything that happened around him.

And Samson wasn't the only bet on youth — because the only good news in that dismal 2025 had been young. Mid-season, CSK kept blooding kids: Urvil Patel (striking at a frankly cartoonish 200-plus), Ayush Mhatre and Dewald Brevis all flashed serious promise in their handful of games. And the one scoreline worth carrying into the winter was that final-day 83-run demolition of Gujarat Titans — 230 on the board, GT folded for 147 — a parting flicker that hinted the young core might just be onto something.

So CSK leaned all the way in. At the auction they spent so heavily on uncapped Indians Kartik Sharma and Prashant Veer that the pair became the joint-most-expensive uncapped players ever signed at an IPL auction — record money, before either had faced a single ball in yellow. On paper it was the balance every side dreams of: proven experience up top in Samson and Ruturaj, the muscle of Shivam Dube in the middle and the reassuring presence of Dhoni to close — wrapped around a genuinely thrilling young core in the 2025 finds and the record auction buys. Youth and experience, fire and calm, all in one dressing room. The intent was right. The execution just kept running into the physio's table.

First, the elephant in the dressing room: the injuries

You cannot honestly review CSK's 2026 batting without talking about the treatment table, because that's where half the team spent the season. And the curse started before a ball was even bowled.

• The very first blow landed pre-season: Nathan Ellis. The Australian quick, lined up as CSK's specialist death bowler, was ruled out of the entire tournament with a hamstring injury before it began — the opening entry in what became a very long medical file. (More on what that did to the bowling in Part 2.)
• MS Dhoni never played a single game. A calf strain in pre-season was meant to be a two-week thing; it never healed, a thumb injury piled on, and for the first time since 2008 a CSK season happened without Thala taking the field. The one finisher whose whole brand is the last five overs — gone, all season.
• Ayush Mhatre, our hottest bat, broke down mid-season. The 18-year-old was striking at a frankly silly 177.9 and leading the team for runs when he tore his left hamstring against Sunrisers on 18 April, on 30 off 12, mid-acceleration. Ruled out for the year. Akash Madhwal came in as cover, but you don't replace that form.
• Dewald Brevis missed the early part of the season injured too, so the middle order was scrambling for shape before it had even settled.
• And it didn't stop there — Khaleel Ahmed had his season ended by a quad injury (and surgery) after just five games, Jamie Overton broke down in the run-in, and Ramakrishna Ghosh kept drifting in and out of the side, forcing yet more reshuffling.

So keep that in your back pocket as we go through the numbers. This wasn't a full-strength side underperforming. It was a depleted one improvising — and sometimes the improvising was genuinely good.

CSK's IPL 2026 batting leaders

Credit where it's due. The problem was never that nobody scored — it's that not enough people did it at the same time. Here's who carried the bat for CSK this year:

Here's the thing the final tally hides: for the first few weeks, the senior names barely clicked. CSK lost their opening three on the bounce, and the batting was a big part of why. The marquee man, Samson, opened with 6, 7 and 9 — the record signing looking anything but. The bats actually landing blows in that grim start belonged to the kids: teenager Ayush Mhatre announced himself with a fearless 73 off 43 against Punjab, and Jamie Overton swung hard from the lower order — 43 against Rajasthan, 37 against RCB. Useful, but they flattered totals that still weren't enough. You could feel the panic setting in: the whole plan was Samson detonating up top, and Samson wasn't detonating.

And then he did. The dam broke with an unbeaten 115 against Delhi — and crucially he wasn't alone that night, young Mhatre stroking a tidy 59 alongside him — suddenly the gamble made total sense. From there Samson went on a tear: 101 in the 103-run demolition of Mumbai, 87 back at Delhi, a steady drumbeat of Player-of-the-Match nights. When Samson fired, CSK won. That's not a vibe — it's almost a law: every single one of CSK's wins featured a meaningful Samson contribution, and they did not win a game in which he was dismissed cheaply. The biggest trade in club history was, single-handedly at times, keeping the season breathing — and just as Mhatre looked ready to share the load, the hamstring went, and CSK lost the one young partner who'd been keeping pace with him.

Around him there were genuine positives. Ruturaj Gaikwad chipped in 337, record-buy Kartik Sharma justified the hype with 295, Shivam Dube did Shivam Dube things at nearly 160 strike rate, and Mhatre's final tally — 201 in just six innings before the hamstring went — is a haunting little "what if" stamped right into the leaderboard.

But that very dependence is also the season's tragedy in a single line. Look at the run-in: Samson made 20, 27 and 0 in the last three games — and the batting folded with him every time, culminating in being bowled out for 136 in the elimination game. One man clicked, the team flickered to life, a few problems kept nagging — and the moment that one man went quiet, the whole innings went quiet with him. The drop-off after the top group is exactly where the season quietly slipped away.

And here's the curious twist when you slice up who actually made CSK's runs: nobody truly ran away with it. Samson topped the pile but with only a fifth of the team's runs; after him the load was shared fairly evenly between Gaikwad, Kartik, Dube and the rest. In a good year that reads as "lovely depth." In this year it read as "lots of decent contributors, no one seizing games by the scruff" — the difference between a settled batting line-up and a committee:

Where it actually went wrong: CSK vs the playoff teams

Here's the uncomfortable bit. We didn't just "feel" worse than the good teams — we were measurably worse with the bat. The charts below put CSK side by side with the average of the four sides that reached the 2026 playoffs (CSK is not counted in that average, before anyone asks):

Roughly eleven runs an innings (about 181 for CSK against 192 for the playoff pack). Doesn't sound like much until you remember that eleven runs is the difference between "defendable total" and "well, that was a nice evening lads." Over a season, an eleven-run-per-innings shortfall is basically a polite way of saying you finished eighth.

Powerplay, middle, death: where the runs actually leaked

Now for the bit that surprised even me, because it's the opposite of the lazy take. The phase chart above tells a very specific story:

• Powerplay (overs 1–6): this was actually a triumph. CSK scored at 10 an over in the first six — their highest powerplay run rate in any season since 2008 (the next best, 2023, sits at 9.4). Even so it was only a touch behind the elite playoff teams, but make no mistake: opening Samson up top did exactly what it was bought to do. The start was never the problem.
• Middle overs (7–15): this is the wound. CSK scored at 8.6 an over here while the playoff teams cruised at 9.7 — a full run an over, every over, for nine overs. That's where the eleven runs vanished.
• Death (16–20): plot twist — CSK basically matched the best teams. They scored at over ten an over at the death and were within a whisker of the playoff average. The finishing, the one thing we feared most without Dhoni, actually held up.

So the popular "CSK can't finish anymore" narrative? The data politely disagrees. The collapse wasn't at the death — it was that soggy middle phase, overs 7 to 15, where momentum quietly leaked out of the innings and a 190 turned into a 178 you then had to defend with a patched-up attack.

Want to see it? Here's every CSK innings broken into its three phases — powerplay (yellow), middle (blue) and death (dark). Run your eye along the blue band: in too many games it's the skinny bit, the place where a promising start quietly stopped promising:

The captain's conundrum: Ruturaj Gaikwad's strike-rate problem

And if you want a face for that soggy middle phase, it's an uncomfortable one — the captain's. On paper Ruturaj Gaikwad's 337 runs was the second-most for CSK, so "he didn't score" isn't quite the charge. The charge is how he scored them.

Gaikwad batted through 2026 at a strike rate of just 123 — in a season where the playoff teams were hammering along at nine and ten an over, an opener-captain scoring at barely seven an over is an anchor in the wrong sense of the word. Worse, more than a third of his deliveries (38%) were dot balls — over a season, that's a mountain of pressure handed straight to the batters coming in behind him. Even his good days came in low gear: a 74 off 60 against Gujarat (a frankly staggering 30 dot balls in one innings), a 67 off 48 against Mumbai — useful runs, sure, but the kind of slow fifty that quietly puts the chasers ahead.

The chart below lays it bare innings by innings — the navy bars are his runs, the red bars his dot balls, and the blue line his strike rate. Watch how often the red bar climbs and the blue line sags together:

The contrast is the brutal part. On the very same pitches, against the very same attacks, Samson opened at 165 and Gaikwad at 123. One end detonating, the other defusing. When the man setting the tempo — and, as skipper, the standard — spends his innings absorbing rather than attacking, the whole middle phase sags with him. It's no coincidence the captain's quietest gear and CSK's leakiest phase are the same overs.

None of this is to pile on a genuinely fine player having a rough year; it happens. But it did happen, it was costly, and it's why his captaincy and his place came in for open debate by season's end. For a team whose batting fell about eleven runs an innings short, a top-order anchor running at 123 with a third of his balls scoreless is a very large part of that eleven.

The bright spots

If one batter deserves a free filter coffee for life, it's Sanju Samson. In a season where plenty went sideways — and where the man he was effectively swapped for, Jadeja, was doing his thing in another shirt — Samson was the constant. 477 runs, the hundred, the match-winning nights, the one you actually wanted on strike when things got tense. Build different. Possibly part machine. Thank you for your service.

But he wasn't the only feel-good story. Kartik Sharma — one of those record uncapped buys — had the kind of season that should genuinely excite you about the future, precisely because it started badly. Early on he was shuffled all around the order, a cameo here, a lower-order job there, and the returns were thin: 18, 1, 6. He was duly dropped for three games. And then came the redemption arc. Handed a settled spot in the top-middle order on his return, he suddenly looked like a different player — 54 off 40 against Mumbai, 41 against Delhi, a composed 20 against Lucknow, and a glorious season-best 71 off 42 in the second Lucknow game, then 32 against Sunrisers. He closed on 295 runs, almost all of them in that back-half purple patch. And there's a deeper significance here: three years on from Ambati Rayudu's retirement, CSK may finally have found their long-term No. 4 — the calm, flexible middle-order spine they've been quietly missing since 2023. Give a young player a role and a run of games, and look what happens. File under: reasons to be cheerful.

And save a special mention for Urvil Patel, CSK's pocket-sized wrecking ball. On the single most euphoric night of the season he detonated a 65 off 23 to power CSK's 204-run chase against Lucknow — bringing up his fifty in a barely-believable 13 balls, comfortably the fastest fifty any CSK batter managed all season — and sealing the franchise's first successful 200-plus chase since 2018, eight long years. For one glorious evening, the league table didn't matter at all.

And then there's the one that stings the most — Ayush Mhatre. Before the hamstring cruelly ended his season, the 18-year-old was the most thrilling thing in yellow: a fearless 73 off 43 against Punjab, a classy 59 alongside Samson in the Delhi win, all at a strike rate of 177.9. He was leading CSK's run charts when he went down. Six innings, 201 runs, and a whole lot of "imagine if." If 2026 had a future-of-CSK highlight reel, Mhatre would open it — and you suspect he'll be back to finish the job. 🦁

What didn't click (deep breath)

Fan goggles off for a second. The talent was clearly there — but a batting line-up is judged on what it does together, and too often the pieces refused to click at the same time. Here's where it actually unravelled:

• Too much reliance on one or two batters. This is the headline failing. CSK basically didn't win a game in which Samson was dismissed cheaply — when the marquee man went quiet, there was no one to reliably take the baton. Gaikwad anchored but at a crawl; the rest blew hot and cold. A top-heavy side is fine until the top fails, and in 2026 it failed just often enough.
• Not enough match-defining innings. For all the runs, CSK managed just two hundreds all season — both of them Samson's — and only nine individual fifties across fourteen games. That's the statistical fingerprint of a batting unit full of starts and short of daddy knocks: plenty of 20s and 30s, far too few of the 70-plus efforts that flip a contest.
• The supporting cast never quite fired. Shivam Dube made 270 runs but — remarkably — never once passed fifty (top score 47); lots of busy 20s and 30s, none of them the innings-defining assault CSK pay him for. Dewald Brevis, injury-hit early, managed just 151 at a sluggish-for-him 128 strike rate with a best of 44 — the firework that never really went off. Matt Short came and went with 60 runs in three games. And Sarfaraz Khan was genuinely watchable — a brisk 169 strike rate, one neat fifty — but 161 runs across the season was neither the volume nor the week-in-week-out consistency you'd hope for. Plenty of talent; not enough of it delivered at once.
• The middle overs, 7–15. This is the real one. A run an over behind the best teams across the engine room of the innings — death by a thousand dots. It's where the captain's slow tempo and the lack of a settled No. 4-5 bit hardest, and it's where a promising 60-for-1 kept curdling into a sub-par 130-for-4.
• The injuries compounded everything. Losing Mhatre mid-flight, never having Dhoni, and then Overton breaking down in the run-in meant the order kept reshuffling. You could see the lack of settled roles in those flat middle overs — batters unsure whether to build or blast, because the man around them kept changing.
• Not enough big totals. Add it all up and CSK simply didn't post enough par-plus scores to cover for an overworked, equally injury-hit bowling attack. Too many 160s on pitches worth 185 — and on those nights, the margin for the bowlers vanished (more on those poor souls in Part 2).

The cruellest bookend

What makes it ache more is how close CSK came. With three games to spare they sat fifth in the table on 12 points — right in the playoff conversation, fate in their own hands, needing maybe two wins from the last three to gatecrash the top four. The door was literally ajar.

And then — because of course it did — the injury curse landed one final, perfectly-timed blow. Right as the run-in began, Jamie Overton, in form with both bat and ball and fresh off a three-wicket night in that Lucknow win, was ruled out injured. Losing arguably their most influential all-rounder ripped yet another seamer out of an attack that had been held together with tape since Nathan Ellis went down in pre-season. The bowling, already stretched, now had nothing left — and it showed. CSK promptly lost three straight — Lucknow, then Sunrisers (which knocked them down to sixth, hanging by a thread), then a win-or-bust finale against Gujarat they duly lost. The team that began the year losing its first three games ended it losing its last three. Whistle podu, rinse, repeat, heartbreak. (Just how badly the attack creaked is a story for Part 2.)

And cricket, being cricket, saved one more gut-punch for last. Twelve months earlier CSK had ended 2025 by hammering Gujarat Titans by 83 runs. In 2026, the very same fixture closed the book on the season — except this time GT returned it with interest, an 89-run thrashing that confirmed elimination. From "230 and GT folded" to "GT 229, CSK folded for 140" in one year. If you wanted a single scoreline to sum up how far the batting drifted, that mirror-image is it.

CSK's IPL 2026 batting report card

Grade: C+. "Has the talent, lost half the squad to the physio, did not submit the homework." The top of the order was competitive, the death overs actually held up, but a run-an-over leak through the middle — plus an injury list that read like a hospital roster — dragged the output a clear notch below the teams that mattered in May. Fixable? Absolutely. Painful in the meantime? Also absolutely.

CSK batting in 2026: occasionally majestic, frequently a group project where two people did all the work while the rest were in the treatment room. Classic Yellow. Whistle podu — through gritted teeth. 🦁

Part 2 takes apart the bowling — the pace, the spin, the death overs we'd rather forget, and whether the attack was let down by the batting or just as guilty. Coming soon.