As the five-wicket defeat to Sunrisers Hyderabad pushed Chennai Super Kings to the brink, their hopes of qualification for the play-offs isn’t in their hands anymore. Should they fail to make it, it would be the third successive season that Chennai have failed to make the play-offs. With the pressure piling on head coach Stephen Fleming, the Kiwi has refused to confirm his continuity, revealing the decision would be taken by the management.
Since arriving at the franchise as a player during the inaugural edition of the IPL in 2008, Fleming took charge as the head coach in the 2009 and has since become the longest serving coach at any IPL franchise. With 5 titles and two Champions League titles, Fleming is the most decorated coach in IPL, but after another failed shot at making the play-offs, there has been growing displeasure among the CSK faithful. Those noises had reached Fleming which he acknowledged early in the season.
And speaking shortly after their defeat to Hyderabad, Fleming was asked if he would be back next year to steer the team. “Well, it’s always a choice for the management,” Fleming conceded. “There’s been a lot of talk about it. There’s a lot of good things we’ve done. We’ve introduced some new players that will be hopefully generation players for the CSK, but I know we are judged on results, that’s fair. So yeah, that’s the management’s call,” the former New Zealand captain said.
CSK began the season with three straight defeats before they got the campaign back on track in the middle phase. And when there was a spot in the play-off was there for the taking their last two defeats to Lucknow Super Giants and Hyderabad ended up being a big blow for the franchise which has been ravaged by injuries to key players. Having lost Nathan Ellis before the start, through the course of the campaign they ended up losing Khaleel Ahmed, Ayush Mhatre, Ramakrishna Ghosh and Jamie Overton, who had all been part of the XII. While injures did play a part, the performance of the team was once again below par.
“We knew coming into the season we’re a little bit behind in terms of other teams having a year to beat down their plans. We had made a lot of changes halfway through the first year of the cycle and we made more changes going into this year. It would have been great to have started well, but we started poorly. And then I was really proud of the recovery to get back and win, I think six out of eight and get back into the mix was really satisfying. There was a style of cricket that we were developing that was working. But yeah, we had injuries to key players, which sort of stopped a bit of momentum and made us a little bit unsettled in terms of having to keep changing the team,” Fleming said.
