CSK host Gujarat at Chepauk with Sanju Samson on a roll and Shubman Gill the only thing keeping GT alive
Three from seven sounds like a tie. Look at the form line and it is anything but.
Chennai Super Kings will host Gujarat Titans at the MA Chidambaram Stadium on Sunday afternoon with the kind of momentum a struggling start does not normally allow. Three wins from their last four, the most recent of which was a 103-run thrashing of Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede that gave them their biggest win in IPL history by margin of runs. Sanju Samson has gone from three single-digit scores to start the season to two centuries and a 48 in the four games since. Akeal Hosein and Noor Ahmad have started bowling like a pair of wrist spinners on a Chennai night.
Gujarat have done the opposite. The 5-wicket loss in Bengaluru on Friday left them with two wins from their last five, and Shubman Gill has been doing most of the batting on his own. He is the leading run-scorer for the side with 297 runs from six matches and three fifties.
Samson, finally, doing what they bought him for
The numbers on Samson's IPL 2026 are now hard to argue with. 293 runs at a strike rate of 178 in this season alone, two centuries from his last four innings, and a stand-and-deliver knock against Mumbai that turned the Wankhede silent inside an hour. CSK paid a heavy price to get him out of Rajasthan and the early returns were exactly the kind that gets a fanbase nervous. Three single-digit scores, no obvious chemistry with the new dressing room, the kind of slow start that haunts a player.
The last four innings have flipped that. He is opening with Ruturaj Gaikwad now, taking the new ball for himself, and pulling the kind of length other batters duck under. Gujarat will have looked at the Mumbai tape this week.
The Noor problem
Noor Ahmad's IPL 2026 has been quiet only by his own standards. Six wickets in seven, an economy around nine, and a recent run of five wickets in three games at 6.50 an over. He gets the ball to grip on a Chepauk afternoon in a way Rashid Khan no longer can. With Akeal Hosein at the other end taking four for 17 in his last outing, CSK have a spin pair that should worry any team coming to Chennai.
Gill knows what is coming. He has played Rashid in the nets for years and he handled Akeal's left-arm orthodox well on his way to that 32 in Bengaluru. The rest of the GT order needs to do something to take the heat off him.
A high-scoring afternoon, probably
The Chepauk pitch is no longer the slow turner of folklore. Two of the three IPL games here this season have produced 200-plus first-innings totals. The toss might still matter for the dew factor late in the second innings but the days of CSK winning games on a tired surface alone are largely gone.
Sunday should give us a contest. CSK have the form, the home record, and now a Samson who looks like he has settled. Gujarat have Gill and very little else firing in tandem. If CSK keep winning the way they have for the last three weeks, the playoff race below the top three is going to look very different by the end of the month.
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