Royal Challengers Bengaluru will play Chennai Super Kings at Chepauk on Friday evening. The MA Chidambaram Stadium has always been a nightmare for RCB. RCB has won just 1 and lost the other 8 games out of the 9 encounters that they had with CSK at this venue. And the formula that has made Chepauk a fortress of CSK is spin.
On the slow and sluggish surface of Chennai, RCB always finds themselves in trouble. But in 2025, King Kohli and the company want to end this trend. Virat Kohli has been witnessed in the nets practicing against spin ahead of the super-anticipated “Southern Derby”.
Like the other RCB batters, Kohli also has a record at MA Chidambaram Stadium that he wants to improve. In the 13 IPL innings at Chepauk Stadium, Virat scored 383 runs at an average of 29.46 with a strike rate of 111.01. It is clearly evident that Virat likes to play on the bouncy and pacey wicket of Chinnaswamy; that’s why he had a mountain of runs there. But his record in IPL against spin is not up to his standards.
In the last five IPL seasons, Virat’s best tournament against spin was the 2024 IPL, where he scored 292 runs on 213 deliveries of spinners with a strike rate of 137.08 and an average of 58.4. During this time he was dismissed five times by spinners.
Although he scored boundaries on 15.02% of deliveries he faced against spin, which was his best in the IPL since 2020. But the stat that amazed cricket pundits was the percentage of the sweep shot Kohli used against spin in 2024. Kohli scored 10.6% of his runs against spin on sweep shots, the highest in the last five years.
Kohli vs Spin in IPL Since 2020
| Year | Runs | BF | SR | Out | Ave | Dot% | Bnd% | Sweep% |
| 2020 | 220 | 202 | 108.91 | 2 | 110 | 27.1 | 6.43 | 1 |
| 2021 | 134 | 134 | 100 | 3 | 44.66 | 36 | 8.95 | 2.2 |
| 2022 | 107 | 99 | 108.08 | 4 | 26.75 | 31 | 8.08 | 1 |
| 2023 | 238 | 211 | 112.79 | 5 | 47.6 | 25.4 | 9.95 | 1.9 |
| 2024 | 292 | 213 | 137.08 | 5 | 58.4 | 28.5 | 15.02 | 10.6 |
| 2025 | 24 | 20 | 120 | 0 | – | 20 | 10 | 20 |
The numbers of Virat indicate that he is well-prepared to face the deadly spin trio of R. Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, and Noor Ahmad. The same spin attack dismantled the Mumbai Indians’ batting lineup in their first game of IPL 2025.
But RCB’s batting coach Dinesh Karthik has full confidence in Virat Kohli. While interacting with the media on the eve of the game, he said, “He (Virat Kohli) has batted well in the recent past against spin, especially in white-ball cricket.”
“So, I don’t want to go too deep into stats. I am not very aware. But if I remember, in the T20 World Cup finals, he got runs where it mattered. And apart from that, in the Champions Trophy, he had a good tournament, second-highest run-getter [for India]. And that doesn’t come without playing on spin.”So, I believe right now, he is batting as well as he has ever done. And you speak to him even today, just now as I came out… he wanted to work on one more shot. At this point of time, to work on one more shot tells you the hunger that he has in his mindset. He wants to just improve and keep raising the bar. So, he is a special player. And at this point of time, the way I see it, he is batting as confidently and as well as he has ever done in IPL.”
CSK and RCB both started their 2025 campaign on a winning note, defeating their opponents one-sidedly. Now both of them try to carry on that winning momentum and get an early lead in the points table. At the current moment, RCB is at the top of the table and CSK is in 4th place.
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