Gill and Sudharsan Set It Up, Buttler Finished It, Siraj Buried It — Chennai's 2026 Ends in Ahmedabad

There is a particular cruelty that the IPL reserves for sides that have built dynasties — when the end comes, it does not arrive with a close finish and a brave last over. It arrives the way it arrived for Chennai Super Kings at Ahmedabad on Thursday night: with two opposition openers helping themselves to a record-equalling partnership, an English finisher walking out and treating an international new-ball attack like a net session, and a fast bowler returning to the city he calls his second home to deliver the three wickets that effectively ended the chase before it had a chance to begin. Gujarat Titans 229 for 4. Chennai Super Kings 140 all out in 13.4 overs. Defeat by 89 runs — Gujarat's biggest win by runs in their short IPL history. For Chennai, a third successive season without a top-four finish. The dynasty is not over — but the 2026 season most certainly is.

The story of this match has three distinct chapters, and each of them belongs to a player who has been in some version of this form all year. Shubman Gill reached his half-century in 23 balls and crossed 600 runs for the season in doing so. B Sai Sudharsan, his opening partner, made 84 off 53 and joined Gill in the same 600-run club on the same night. Jos Buttler, promoted to finish, hit 57 not out off 27 with the kind of cool insouciance that has characterised his second wind as a Gujarat player. And Mohammed Siraj — back in the city where he learned much of his trade as a Sunrisers Hyderabad junior all those years ago — bowled Sanju Samson for a golden duck, removed Ruturaj Gaikwad cheaply, and trapped Urvil Patel without scoring inside the powerplay. Three wickets, twenty deliveries, and a chase of 230 was already a wake.

The 125-run opening stand between Gill and Sudharsan deserves to be the headline statistic, but it is the wider pattern that should worry every team that has to bowl to them in the playoffs. This was their seventh century opening stand together — the most by any opening pair in IPL history. It was also their tenth hundred-run partnership across all wickets, equalling the world T20 record held by Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers, a benchmark that nobody who watched those two RCB years thought would be matched, let alone matched by openers playing for a third party rather than a marquee franchise. In 31 innings together they have now scored 1,942 runs and sit second on the all-time IPL opening-pair run aggregate list. The numbers are not noise. They are the system Gujarat have built their season around — two top-three batters who get them to 100-plus inside ten overs roughly half the time, and who then hand the back end of the innings to a finisher who has rediscovered his eye.

That finisher, on this night, was Buttler. 57 not out off 27 is the kind of cameo that on most evenings becomes the central image of the broadcast — eight, ten, twelve cleanly struck shots that the ground simply could not contain. The fact that it almost feels like an afterthought in this match report is itself a measure of how complete Gujarat's batting performance was. Sudharsan's 84 had the patience and the strike rotation that allows openers to bat deep. Gill's 23-ball fifty had the violence of a captain who is finally enjoying the freedom that comes from a team functioning around him. And Buttler at the end was a luxury — a luxury Chennai have not had on offer to them all season, and never on the same evening from three different batters.

And then there was the bowling. Mohammed Siraj's Player of the Match award was for the opening burst — the kind of new-ball spell that reminded everyone that he remains, on his evenings, the best Indian fast bowler in the tournament. Sanju Samson played all over a full one and was bowled for a golden duck. Ruturaj Gaikwad pushed at a delivery and edged. Urvil Patel was struck on the pads playing across. Three wickets, twenty balls, and the chase of 230 was effectively a procession before it had even reached its first drinks break. Kagiso Rabada finished with 3 for 32, Rashid Khan with three of his own — the kind of bowling unit return that allows Gujarat to defend even modest totals, never mind 230.

For Chennai Super Kings, this is a night that ends not just a match but a season — and arguably a chapter in the franchise's identity. Eliminated from playoff contention for the third successive year. Out of the top four in the same season they had hoped Ruturaj Gaikwad's captaincy would crystallise into something more durable. And eliminated in the manner that is hardest to spin — a 29 for 3 inside the powerplay, a brief Shivam Dube cameo of 47 off 17 that briefly flickered into hope and was then snuffed out by Gill's running catch at extra cover, and a back end where the bowlers had to come in to bat with too many overs left and not enough top-order runs in the bank.

The diagnosis is the same one this column has been writing in different forms all April and May: CSK's top order has been fragile, their overseas slots have not produced enough impact, and the bowling unit has been carrying weights it was never designed to lift. Samson's golden duck was the worst possible start in the worst possible match. Gaikwad's 16 was the kind of dismissal that has happened too often this season — a captain looking to lead from the front and getting out at the wrong moment. The lower order had to play with the asking rate climbing, and even Dube's brief explosion was undone by the fact that he had nobody to hit with. There will be plenty to debate about the squad in the off-season — the auction strategy, the overseas mix, the question of whether the spin-heavy attack can survive on grounds that are not Chepauk — but the conversation has to wait. Tonight, the conversation is simply that the season is over.

The pitch at the Narendra Modi Stadium played truer than the venue's recent reputation might have suggested. 229 for 4 in the first innings on a surface that is usually slow and offers double-paced behaviour for the spinners tells you that the ball came on well enough through the first innings — and that Sudharsan, in particular, was watchful enough through the powerplay to absorb whatever assistance there was for the seamers before he opened up after the field came in. The dew, when it arrived, did not significantly change the contest because Chennai's chase never reached the phase where dew could have helped. Siraj's spell with the new ball came when the surface still had a little zip, and he extracted exactly the bounce and seam movement that bowlers had hoped would come on offer.

The toss decision, in retrospect, looks worse than it was at the time. Gaikwad chose to bowl on the assumption that the surface would deteriorate and dew would come in. The first part of the assumption turned out to be wrong — the surface, if anything, played better in the first innings than it did at the start of the second — and the second part was irrelevant once Siraj had ripped the heart out of the top order. But this is the cricket the captain has had to make decisions in all season. The margins have been thin. The luck has not gone with him. And the consequence is a team whose campaign is over with two matches still to play.

Mohammed Siraj's Player of the Match award was for an opening spell that, on its own, decided the contest. The three top-order wickets — Samson bowled, Gaikwad caught behind, Urvil trapped in front — came inside the powerplay and inside twenty balls of his own. There was nothing freakish about the spell. It was old-fashioned new-ball bowling: full enough to threaten the stumps, just back of a length enough to live off the seam movement available, and disciplined enough on line that the batters had to play. Samson, looking to come down the track, never reached the pitch of a full one. Gaikwad, sliding across his stumps, edged behind. Urvil, frozen at the crease, found himself struck on the pads to a ball he could not have left.

The wider Siraj story is one of an Indian bowler who, on his nights, is the best fast bowler this competition has on its books, and who has slowly built a body of work in IPL 2026 that argues he should be undroppable for India through the World Cup and beyond. The wider Gujarat Titans story is that they now have a bowler who can take the new ball anywhere — Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kolkata — and produce a spell that wins them a match by itself. Siraj's spell against Chennai was not the most physically arduous of his season. It was, however, possibly the most match-defining.

An honest reckoning on our preview: we tipped GT on the basis of home advantage at Motera and the team's familiarity with the venue's dimensions, and that lean turned out to be correct in direction and conservative in magnitude. We argued the toss would matter; it mattered, but not in the way we expected — Gaikwad did make the call we had predicted he might, and it backfired more comprehensively than anyone could have foreseen. We suggested the side that adapted better to the slow surface would walk away with the points, and Gujarat did exactly that, but it was not the slow surface that decided the night — it was Gill, Sudharsan, Buttler and Siraj producing three contributions each of which would have won a normal match by itself. What we did not flag, and should have: the Gill-Sudharsan opening stand has become the single most reliable scoring engine in the tournament, and on a flat surface against a misfiring CSK attack, the upper bound on what they could do was always going to be uncomfortable for the away side. A win by 89 runs is on the extreme end of the distribution, but the distribution itself was always skewed in Gujarat's favour.

For Gujarat Titans, this win all but seals a top-two finish and a place in Qualifier 1. With a net run rate now buoyed by an 89-run margin, only an extreme run of results across the final round of league matches can shake them from a direct route to the final. The squad has the look of a unit hitting its peak at exactly the right moment — Gill in form as captain and batter, Sudharsan compiling consistently from one end, Buttler firing as a finisher, Siraj leading the bowling attack and Rashid still casting his usual spell over middle-overs batters. There are no obvious weaknesses going into the playoffs. For Chennai Super Kings, the remaining matches now become a chance to look at the squad with a different lens — who plays for IPL 2027, who needs to step away, who needs to be given freedom in the absence of qualification pressure. The next match against Delhi Capitals on Friday is meaningless in playoff terms, but meaningful in the longer story of a franchise that has to begin rebuilding from a starting point lower than at any point in the last fifteen years. The dynasty is not over. But the rebuilding has to start now.