Dubai
Just as it was expected, the news of Chennai Super Kings captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his star player Suresh Raina getting split in the new India Premier League (IPL) draft was indeed heartbreaking for the team’s legion of followers.
These two top performers were instrumental in helping Chennai live up to their name as the “super kings” of the IPL for seven years.
They will now be pitched against each other with Dhoni being snapped up by Pune and Rajkot getting Raina.
Chennai are supposed to return to IPL after serving the two-year suspension that was imposed on the team following the IPL 2013 spot-fixing and betting scandal. Will this team that was much loved by everyone be the same in 2018?
Chennai had a superb combination and gelled very well under the astute leadership of Dhoni. Winning the IPL twice and reaching the final four times out of the eight editions of the tournament speaks volumes of their strength.
By emerging as the champions of the Champions League twice, beating the best Twenty20 teams from around the world, Chennai had proved that they are a formidable power in this format of the game.
It is unfortunate that the mischief of Gurunath Meiyappan, the Chennai “team principal” who has been implicated in the 2013 IPL sport-fixing and betting case, has deprived fans around the world the opportunity to watch a formidable team in action.
With none of the Chennai players being directly or indirectly involved in the scandal, the team should have not been banned. More than the players, it’s the die-hard fans that are now being punished through the ban.
Not going to be easy
Chennai players will now get to play in the IPL representing other teams but the fans will miss their favourite team. Even for Dhoni, who actually moulded this team, it will be tough.
Dhoni had played and captained Chennai for seven years and to adjust to a new franchise is not going to be easy. It was a team that was build up systematically from 2008 and blossomed to win the title twice in succession in 2010 and 2011.
Right from inception, Chennai had a vision and inducted players who would contribute to their plans of becoming the best side.
In the first auction in 2008, Chennai went all out to get Dhoni for $1.5 million (Dh5.5 million) and that made him the costliest player of the auction. The team also got the best international players at the time, including the world’s highest wicket taker Muttiah Muralitharan, hard-hitter Matthew Hayden, limited-over specialist Michael Hussey and the brilliant strokemaker Stephen Fleming.
South Africa’s Kepler Wessels was the team’s first coach and in the first year they became runners up and earned a spot in the inaugural Champions League Twenty20 event which unfortunately got cancelled due to 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Before the start of the 2009 edition, Fleming, who also had the reputation of being one of the shrewdest captains in world cricket — retired from all forms of the game and took over from Wessels as the team’s coach.
Valuable brand
Chennai never hesitated in spending money to get the best and in 2009, they bought Andrew Flintoff for $1.55 million, which also made him the costliest player of the auction along with Kevin Pietersen, who went to Royal Challengers Bangalore for the same amount. Chennai’s Hayden scored 572 runs in 12 innings with five half-centuries at an average of 52 and strike rate of 145 that won the Orange Cap for the leading run-scorer of the season.
During the next two years, Chennai proved their might, winning the title in succession. Fans got to see the spin duo of Ravichandran Ashwin and Muralitharan bowling in tandem, troubling every batsman. In 2012, Chennai made sure not to lose their winning combination and retained Dhoni, vice-captain Raina, Murali Vijay and Albie Morkel for a total of $4.5 million.
The meteoric rise of the Chennai team saw the UK-based Brand Finance, which carried out a brand evaluation of the IPL teams, rate Chennai as the most valuable team with a brand value of $100 million. The brand evaluation agency, which evaluated 150 most valuable teams in the world, placed Chennai at 147th place.
Sponsors had never been a problem for the yellow shirts either. Aircel became the team’s first shirt sponsor and signed a three-year deal and so popular was the team that to renew their sponsorship they had to pay $12.6 million. Brands like Pepsi, Reebok and Gulf Oil also lined up with sponsorship deals.
In April 2014 Chennai signed up with UST Global as their principal sponsor for three years when the disaster struck the team.
On July 14, 2015 when the R.M. Lodha committee suspended the owners of Chennai along with Rajasthan for two years, it marked the crash of a team that had won the hearts of millions of cricket fans during their days of glory.
That incident left every fan asking the question: whether they will be the same team again?
