Mhatre and Urvil show up CSK's old-school auction

Urvil Patel, Ayush Mhatre, Dewald Brevis. None of them were part of Chennai Super Kings' (CSK) original squad for IPL 2025, so there's some irony to the fact that they finish the season on top of the team's strike rates list (minimum 50 balls faced), having gone at 212.50, 188.97 and 180.00 respectively.

These three sit some distance above the next name on the list, Ruturaj Gaikwad (150.61), who is himself a fair way above the rest of the pack (Sam Curran is next at 135.71).

That list tells the story of CSK's season: an under-powered squad finishing bottom of the table, finding a small measure of consolation through a trio of players signed too late to change their fate. They won two of their last three games, passed 200 twice in their last four - having done so just once in their first 10 matches - and signed off on Sunday with their biggest total and their biggest win of the season, beating Gujarat Titans (GT) by 83 runs, but they began the day at the bottom of the league table and knew all along that they'd end it there.

For whatever it was worth, though, Mhatre, Urvil and Brevis were key to CSK's late surge.

That two of those players are uncapped Indian batters in their debut IPL seasons tells another story: a team that has demonstrated, for close to two decades, a preference for the tried-and-tested over raw potential almost unwillingly buying into the idea of youthful promise.

But there's a bigger story too, which goes beyond CSK. We'll come to it soon enough.

Now while CSK have always been old-school in their approach to squad construction, they've tended to be ahead of the curve when it comes to their actual playing philosophy. They recognised before anyone else in the IPL that T20 is a fickle format, and that it's best to identify your best combination and stick with it, ignoring the pressure to chop and change based on success and failure over small sample sizes. Even in the pre-Impact-Player era, their line-ups usually had more depth and flexibility than those of most other teams, because of their heavy use of allrounders.

And they've always valued six-hitters. They hit the most sixes in the competition when they won the 2018 and 2021 titles with their Dad's Army team, and the second-most sixes (behind Mumbai Indians) when they won it again in 2023. Their first great team, which reached the final six times in the first eight seasons of the IPL, hit more sixes than any other team in that period.

They've been old-school, and for much of their history they've been, well, old, but it would be inaccurate to brand CSK as a backward-looking team. You don't become the IPL's joint-most-successful franchise by playing a regressive brand of T20.

If there was a mistrust of young, unproven Indian batters through all these years, it probably stemmed from a belief that had some basis in fact: that Indian cricket didn't produce enough batters ready for the top level of T20 for CSK to take a chance on them. Through most of the IPL's history, India has tended to produce batters who've played in an all-format way rather than power-hitters, with the likes of Hardik Pandya and Shivam Dube only coming along sporadically.

For years, CSK excelled in picking all-format-ish players in the second halves of their careers and maximising their six-hitting potential: Ambati Rayudu and Ajinkya Rahane, for example. When IPL 2025 began, they probably felt they could do something similar with Rahul Tripathi, Deepak Hooda and Vijay Shankar. This trick had worked for them before; why wouldn't it work again?

It's possible that CSK could have put together a fairly successful season with their original squad if form, fitness and luck had been kinder to them. But the chances of their old squad-building methods bringing them success were lower this year than ever before, because while CSK hadn't changed, the IPL had - unrecognisably.

Look at this list. Four of the top ten strike rates in IPL 2025, with a cut-off of 100 runs, belong to Indian batters in their debut seasons - Vaibhav Suryavanshi, Mhatre, Priyansh Arya and Vipraj Nigam - and one to a batter in his second season - Naman Dhir.

This explosion of Indian hitting talent was bound to happen sooner or later, all these years into the life cycles of T20 and the IPL. It was only natural that Mhatre, born just over two months before the T20 World Cup final of 2007, harnessed his gifts of hand and eye in a T20 direction. It's astonishing that this 17-year-old can clear his front leg and flat-bat balls of good length or shorter over mid-on and mid-off, as he did so thrillingly against Mohammed Siraj and Arshad Khan on Sunday, but it shouldn't be surprising.

Urvil is significantly older, at 26, but young enough to have spent a significant chunk of his formative years working on his six-hitting skills. He was the highest six-hitter in the 2024-25 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, hitting 29 in six games for Gujarat, and he's now hit six in his first 32 balls at CSK, including an effortless flick off Siraj that may have been the shot of CSK's innings on Sunday.

Mhatre and Urvil are archetypes of the batting talent that's now coming through the Indian cricket pipeline, blessed with a significantly higher ceiling for power and explosiveness than previous generations.

While most teams in the IPL cottoned onto this well before IPL 2025, scouting players out of state-run leagues and putting them in their first XIs without a second thought, CSK continued to trust in the tried and tested. You could understand why, because it had worked so many times over so many seasons, but this season wouldn't just be a new season but an entirely new tournament.