IPL 2026 will start on March 28 and Chennai Super Kings have a lot riding on the next two months. They finished last in 2025, which for a franchise with five titles and a culture built around finding ways to win is about as uncomfortable as it gets.

There are plenty of reasons that the season went the way it did, but the one that has refused to go away, the one that kept coming up through the off-season and has only gotten louder as the new campaign approaches, is the same question that has been circling MS Dhoni for the last two or three years now. Where is he batting, and is it actually working?

A position pf MS Dhoni that kept moving in the wrong direction

It wasn’t always like this. For the better part of a decade MS Dhoni was the kind of middle-order batter that opposition captains built their plans around.

MS Dhoni batted between four and six, read chases better than almost anyone in the format, and had this extraordinary ability to stay calm while the asking rate climbed and then take a game apart in the final five overs. That version of MS Dhoni was the reason CSK won so much for so long.

What has happened since is a slow drift, to seven, then eight, then nine, until the role started looking like something that was being shaped around what he could no longer do rather than what he still could.

In IPL 2024, MS Dhoni batted as low as eight or nine through most of the season, faced 73 balls in total across the entire tournament, and hit them at a strike rate north of 220. Those are remarkable numbers.

But 73 balls across a full season is also a remarkably small window for a player of his caliber to work with, and the question of what it costs CSK to generate those numbers so rarely and so late is one the franchise has never really answered publicly.

What the critics are really saying about CSK legend’s batting position

The debate has matured this season into something more pointed than it used to be. It is no longer just fans asking why MS Dhoni does not come in earlier.

Argument now is about whether batting him this deep is genuinely the best option for CSK or whether it is an arrangement built around managing his body at 44 rather than maximizing his value as a cricketer.

The case for moving him up is straightforward enough, if MS Dhoni faces 25 to 30 balls in an innings instead of the five or ten he has been getting, MS Dhoni is still capable of winning games in ways that nobody else in that dressing room can match.

That is not a nostalgic argument, it is a practical one. His hands are still quick, his reading of the game is still exceptional, and his ability to calculate a chase under pressure has not gone anywhere.

What has changed is that by the time MS Dhoni walks to the crease these days the required run rate is often already at 18 or above, which is a number that neutralises rather than showcases those strengths. The criticism is not that MS Dhoni cannot do it anymore.

It is that the situation he is being handed when he comes in has made it nearly impossible for him to show that he can.

Why fixing it is harder than it looks

The squad CSK have heading into 2026 makes this a genuinely complicated problem to solve rather than just a matter of moving a name up the order.

Top and middle are packed with players who need their own space and their own balls to function, Ruturaj Gaikwad leading the side at the top, a settled batting group behind him, and enough firepower through the middle that slotting MS Dhoni in at six without disrupting the whole structure is not as simple as it sounds.

The most honest reading of how CSK’s lineup shapes up puts MS Dhoni at seven at the earliest on most nights, and the logic of the squad construction has a way of pushing him lower than that depending on match situations.

Which is exactly the problem. Seven or eight in a T20 innings, given how quickly the final overs arrive and how high the asking rate tends to be by then, often means walking in with conditions that have already moved past the point where even Dhoni can reliably change them.

What actually makes sense?

The right answer to where MS Dhoni bats in 2026 is probably not a number at all, it is a principle. If Chennai are three wickets down inside twelve overs and need someone to hold the innings together and then accelerate, six is ​​the call.

If the platform is already set and the innings is in good shape going into the last five overs, seven or eight as a pure finishing cameo makes complete sense.

The problem with how this has been handled in recent seasons is that the situational intelligence that should define how he is used has collapsed into a default, he comes in late, more or less regardless of what the match actually needs, and is then expected to rescue something that has already slipped too far.

That is not a Dhoni problem. That is a management problem. The player who reads a chase better than almost anyone who has ever played this format is still in that dressing room. Whether Chennai Super Kings are willing to be flexible and clear-eyed enough to actually use him that way is the question that IPL 2026 is going to answer one way or another.