CSK IPL 2026 Bowling Review — By the Numbers & Charts (Part 2)

Welcome to Part 2, where we stop blaming the batters and put the bowlers in the dock. If you've read Part 1, you'll know CSK finished 8th in IPL 2026 — 6 wins, 8 losses — and that the batting fell about eleven runs an innings short of the playoff pack. Easy story, then: rubbish team, rubbish bowling, case closed.

Except that's not what the numbers say at all. Here's the genuinely surprising bit: CSK's bowling was, on the whole, tidier than the four teams that made the playoffs. The attack didn't leak the season away. It did something more frustrating — it kept things quiet and still couldn't win, because it couldn't do the one thing that actually wins you T20 games: take wickets.

A hole CSK dug themselves: the death-overs void

Before we get to the live charts, you have to understand a decision CSK made months before the season — one that shaped everything that followed.

Going into the auction, CSK released their death-overs specialist, Matheesha Pathirana. The slingy yorker machine had a rough 2025 (wickets, but going at 10-plus an over), and CSK wanted a fat auction purse after the two big trades. Fair logic — except it left a Pathirana-shaped hole at the death, and the plan to fill it rested on one man: Nathan Ellis, brought in precisely to be the new death specialist.

Then, as you'll remember from Part 1, Ellis was ruled out in pre-season with a hamstring injury, before a ball was bowled. So CSK began the year having released one death bowler and lost his replacement — the back five overs left to whoever was standing. For a franchise whose identity is suffocating the death, that's the original sin of the season.

The injury ward, bowling wing

And the medical file only got thicker:

• Khaleel Ahmed — the senior seamer meant to lead the new-ball attack — had his season ended by a quad injury and surgery after just five games.
• Jamie Overton, the all-rounder doing a bit of everything, broke down in the run-in — taking his 14 wickets and his overs with him exactly when CSK needed them most.

So read the bowling numbers below knowing this wasn't a settled attack underperforming. It was a patchwork — and a patchwork that, frankly, held together better than it had any right to.

CSK's IPL 2026 bowling leaders

Two names carry this attack. Anshul Kamboj finished as CSK's leading wicket-taker with 21 — and for much of the season he was a revelation at the death, at one stage the league's leading wicket-taker in overs 16–20, reinventing himself as the very death specialist CSK had been missing. The catch is in his economy: it started beautifully and ballooned late, because as the attack thinned around him, even Kamboj got taken apart in the back end.

The other is Noor Ahmad — and he, quietly, was the best thing about CSK's bowling all year. 13 wickets at an economy of just 8.4, the most economical frontline bowler in the side: control and threat through the middle overs, the Afghan wrist-spinner doing exactly what he was signed to do, every single week.

And don't let the numbers fool you on Jamie Overton — his 14 wickets badly undersell him. He had a knack for striking at the crucial moments: a game-turning 4 for 18 in the Delhi win, and three-fers that repeatedly broke dangerous partnerships just as they threatened to run away. Fewer wickets than the headline pair, sure, but few CSK bowlers were better at actually changing the course of a game — which is exactly why losing him in the run-in hurt so much.

Akeal Hosein was a sneakily important piece too — trusted with the new ball and bowling the powerplay genuinely well (around 8.4 an over with three powerplay wickets, attacking left-arm spin used inside the ring to break the openers' rhythm), then squeezing even tighter through the middle at 7.6.

After the front-liners, though, the drop-off is steep — and the supporting cast was a mixed bag. Mukesh Choudhary comes out of it best: drafted in once Khaleel broke down, he took over the new-ball role from mid-April and did a genuinely solid, unfussy job — eight wickets and a steady hand exactly when the seam-bowling cupboard was running bare. Gurjapneet Singh, in and out of the XI, never quite stamped his authority — four wickets at north of nine an over, the odd tidy spell undone by expensive ones. And then, for some light relief, there was Matt Henry: handed the new ball in those first three defeats, the Kiwi quick leaked at a frankly heroic 13-plus an over and looked like a man who'd lost his GPS — couldn't find a length, couldn't find an end, and was quietly never seen again after game three. We choose to believe he made the XI on the strict New Zealand quota (coach Stephen Fleming being, of course, a proud son of Christchurch — as is Henry) rather than anything as vulgar as form. We've all had weeks like that. Just not usually at 13 an over, in front of a full house.

Tidy but toothless: CSK vs the playoff teams

Here's the chart that flips the whole narrative. Against the average of the four playoff teams (CSK not counted in that average):

Read those tiles carefully, because they're not what you'd expect from an 8th-placed side:

• Economy: CSK were actually better. They conceded at roughly 9.6 an over to the playoff teams' 9.8. Tighter. More disciplined. The bowling did not leak runs relative to the good teams.
• Wickets: this is the problem. CSK took only about 5.4 wickets an innings; the playoff teams took around 6.4 — a full wicket per game fewer. In T20, wickets are how you actually stop a total snowballing, and CSK simply couldn't break enough partnerships.

That's the paradox of CSK's 2026 attack in one line: tidy but toothless. They kept the run rate respectable and then watched, helpless, as set batters cashed in because nobody could dislodge them.

Powerplay to death: where the wheels came off

Same trick as the batting review — let's split the bowling by phase. And, pleasingly for once, most of it is good news:

• Powerplay (overs 1–6): genuinely solid. CSK's new-ball bowling went at 9.9 an over, fractionally better than the playoff teams. The start, as with the bat, was never the issue.
• Middle overs (7–15): their strongest phase — Noor and the spinners squeezed teams here, conceding just 8.8 an over (about 77 runs an innings) against the playoff teams' 9.4. Control personified.
• Death (16–20): the wound. This is where it all unravelled — CSK leaked at nearly 11 an over, roughly 46 runs an innings handed over in the last five — their worst phase and the one place they finished worse than the playoff teams. The Pathirana-and-Ellis hole, laid bare: no specialist yorker bowler, a patchwork seam attack, and the back five overs became a weekly bloodbath. Nowhere was it grislier than against RCB, who plundered 97 off the final five overs on their way to 250.

You can watch it happen match by match below — every CSK bowling innings, split into powerplay (yellow), middle (blue) and death (dark). Look at how often that dark death band balloons:

And here's a cruel little symmetry between the two halves of this review. In Part 1 we found CSK's batting at the death actually held up — the finishing was fine. But their bowling at the death was the single leakiest thing about the whole side. The same five overs that flattered us with the bat haunted us with the ball.

The bright spots

It wasn't all grim — and a couple of these are genuinely exciting.

Noor Ahmad is the headline. In a season where so much went wrong, he was a model of consistency: 13 wickets, an 8.4 economy, the control through the middle that gave CSK a spine on the days nothing else worked. If you're building the 2027 attack, you start by writing his name down in ink.

Anshul Kamboj deserves enormous credit too. Handed the impossible job of replacing a death specialist CSK didn't have, he didn't hide from it — he ran at it, ending as the side's leading wicket-taker with 21 and, for a glorious stretch, the most feared death bowler in the tournament. But the run-in was savage on him, and you could almost watch the load finally crush the man who'd carried it alone. As the support fell away he was carted for 49, 47 and 56 in the back games — and, in the must-win clash with Lucknow, smashed for 63 in his spell including being hit for four sixes in a single over (a bludgeoning he somehow suffered twice that night, eight sixes in all). His ugly final economy is less a verdict on him than on the attack that crumbled around him: overbowled, unprotected, and asked to do a job that needed three fit seamers, not one exhausted one.

And spare a thought for Akeal Hosein — arguably CSK's most under-used asset of the season. Whenever he was handed the ball he delivered: a brilliant 4 for 17 to help blow Mumbai away by 103 runs, and an economy of just 8.0 across the year. Yet he featured in only seven of the fourteen games, shuffled in and out of the XI depending on the pitch and the team combination rather than kept as a fixture. For an attack crying out for control and wickets, repeatedly benching one of your most economical, effective bowlers was a genuinely odd call — on song, these spinners could throttle anyone, and CSK simply didn't unleash him often enough.

And here's the collective tick that sums up the whole argument: give these bowlers something to bowl at, and they defended it. In all three games CSK posted a first-innings total, they won — squeezing Kolkata out for 160 chasing 192, restricting Delhi to 189, and famously bowling Mumbai out for 104 in the 103-run demolition. The bowling was never the problem on the nights the batting gave it a platform. The trouble, as Part 1 laid bare, was just how rarely that platform arrived.

What didn't click (the bowling edition)

Honesty hat on:

• Not enough wickets. The headline failing, and the mirror image of the batting's missing daddy-hundreds. A wicket-an-innings short of the playoff teams is a season-defining gap — containment is lovely, but it's wickets that win knockouts.
• The death overs. Nearly 11 an over in the back five, the one phase CSK lost to the playoff teams — and largely self-inflicted, the bill for releasing Pathirana and losing Ellis before a ball was bowled.
• The pace wilted; the spin saved them. CSK's spinners went at 8.3 an over and took 21 wickets between them; the seamers leaked at nearly 9.8. Strip out Ellis, Khaleel and a fit Overton and the quick-bowling cupboard was alarmingly bare.
• Over-reliance, again. Take Noor, Overton, and Kamboj out of the equation and there simply wasn't a reliable third or fourth wicket-taking option, especially once the injuries bit.
• The run-in collapse, at the worst possible time. This is the gut-punch. CSK hit the must-win stretch sitting fifth, needing wins to reach the playoffs — and that is the exact moment their most influential all-rounder and second-highest wicket-taker, Jamie Overton (14), was ruled out injured. With their best seam-bowling option gone and the attack down to its bones, the back three games were brutal: Kamboj blitzed, the spinners overworked, and the death overs in freefall. It ended with 229 conceded to Gujarat in the elimination game — a total no batting line-up, least of all this one, was ever going to chase. Losing a strike bowler like that the week you need wickets most is about as cruel as it gets.

CSK's IPL 2026 bowling report card

Grade: B–. Yes, higher than the batting's C+ — and here's the defence. This attack lost its designated death bowler to a release, its replacement to a pre-season injury, its senior seamer to surgery and its best all-rounder to the run-in, and still conceded fewer runs per over than the teams that reached the playoffs. That's a genuine overachievement. The fatal flaw was simply that it couldn't take wickets, and the death overs — the part CSK hollowed out themselves — kept handing games back. Tidy, brave, under-resourced, and ultimately a couple of wicket-takers short.

CSK bowling in 2026: held together with tape and Noor Ahmad's left wrist, somehow tidier than the good teams, and still undone by the five overs they'd dismantled in advance. Whistle podu — quietly, so as not to wake the death bowler we didn't sign. 🦁

That's the series done. The honest verdict across both parts: CSK 2026 wasn't one big catastrophe — it was a batting line-up eleven runs light, a bowling attack a wicket short, and an injury list long enough to sink anyone. Fixable. Rebuild's already half-built. Missed you, Thala. See you in 2027. — Read Part 1: the batting review.