Chennai Super Kings clinch unique record held by Royal Challengers

On Sunday, it was a grand return for the Chennai Super Kings as they played in the final for the seventh time. Up in front of the Super Kings was the in-form Sunrisers Hyderabad team, who were fresh from their heroics against Kolkata Knight Riders in the knock-out game.

All eyes were set on MS Dhoni and his men, as they geared up to take their third IPL trophy home, to equal the trophy cabinets of Rohit Sharma’s Mumbai Indians, who have won three IPL trophies as well. Stakes were high, and the pressure like a mountain when the Sunrisers went out to bat.

With a clinical team like Super Kings on the other side, Sunrisers struggled at parts and pieces in the game with their batting, eventually ending the innings at 178 runs. A total of 179 is chaseable, but in a pressure situation could the Chennai batters prove the critics wrong?

After a slow and tough start, Shane Watson proved that he is the man of the finals, as his shots gave the ball and the Sunrisers bowlers a heavy beating. With as many as 117 runs to get the Super Kings home against a tough bowling unit of the Sunrisers.

Which record did Chennai Super Kings break? 

What went unnoticed is that the Super Kings had scored a total of ten sixes in the finals, with Shane Watson scoring eight of them to take CSK’s tally to 145 sixes in the season. This tally was 3 sixes more than what the Royal Challengers Bangalore had scored in the 2016 IPL, where a determinant Virat Kohli led the team to the finals.

In that particular season, Kohli had scored 38 sixes, while his fellow mates AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle scored 37 sixes and 21 sixes respectively.

On the contrary, Super Kings’ Watson scored 35 sixes, with new recruit Ambati Rayudu coming close with 34 and MS Dhoni scoring 30 huge sixes himself. Alongside the trio, Dwayne Bravo and Suresh Raina chipped in with 10 and 12 sixes respectively.

Third in the all-time list are Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) with 130 sixes in 2018 who are then followed by Kings XI Punjab (KXIP) with 127 sixes in 2014 and Mumbai Indians (MI) with 120 sixes in 2015.

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