Ten off two, past midnight: Dhoni's fifth arrives on the reserve day

It ended the way only a Chennai Super Kings story could: past one in the morning, on a day that was never meant to host the game, with the two most trusted hands in the franchise deciding it off the final ball. When Ravindra Jadeja swung Mohit Sharma fine of short fine leg for four, CSK had beaten Gujarat Titans by 5 wickets and MS Dhoni had his fifth IPL title — level, now, with Mumbai Indians at the top of the honours board.

A final the weather refused to allow

The 2023 final at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad was supposed to be played on the Sunday. Instead, a hailstorm and steady rain wiped out any chance of a ball being bowled, and for the first time an IPL final rolled over onto its reserve day. When play finally began on Monday, the outfield and the schedule had both been rearranged around the storm.

Gujarat Titans, the defending champions and hosts, batted first and made 214 for 4. The innings belonged to a 21-year-old: Sai Sudarsan, who struck 96 from 47 balls, carving the CSK attack with a fearlessness that seemed to have settled the night. Wriddhiman Saha’s 54 gave the innings its platform. It was a total that, on a true Ahmedabad surface, looked out of reach.

Conway sets the tempo, the rain rewrites the maths

Then the rain returned mid-innings, and the chase was cut to 15 overs with a revised DLS target of 171. A shortened chase suited a side willing to swing from the first ball, and CSK had exactly that man to open.

Devon Conway took the powerplay apart, racing to 47 off 25 with four fours and two sixes before he fell — an innings that set the run rate CSK needed and, in a final decided by a single boundary, proved the difference. He was named Player of the Match, an award he would later insist belonged to someone else. Shivam Dube’s unbeaten 32 kept the equation alive through the middle, but the target kept drifting just out of reach as wickets fell around the required rate.

The last over

It came down to Jadeja against Mohit Sharma, ten runs required from two deliveries:

Ball	Needed	Outcome
5th	10 off 2	Six over long-on
6th	4 off 1	Four fine of short fine leg

Two swings, both off a bowler who had been Gujarat’s death specialist all season, and the reserve-day epic was over. At the non-striker’s end stood Dhoni; at the crease, Jadeja — the two men whose careers are stitched most tightly into this franchise, finishing the job together.

Why the fifth mattered most

Every CSK title has its own texture, but 2023 carried a particular weight. This was a squad chasing a milestone as much as a trophy:

• Level with Mumbai. The win took Chennai Super Kings to five championships, matching MI’s record haul and reasserting them as the tournament’s defining institution.
• Dhoni’s late chapter. At 41, MS Dhoni was widely thought to be nearing the end. A fifth title, delivered by the players he had backed through every rebuild, felt like a fitting near-final act.
• Redemption in Ahmedabad. A year earlier Gujarat Titans had won the title in their debut season. To take them down on their own ground, on a night the weather kept trying to cancel, gave the victory an extra edge.

For all the modern machinery of the IPL — the impact-player rule that reshaped totals across 2023, the auction economics, the ever-shifting squads — the final came down to something old and simple: two Chennai stalwarts, one boundary, and a captain who has spent fifteen seasons making finals bend his way. Past midnight in Ahmedabad, it bent one more time.

The result, margin and Player-of-the-Match for this final are drawn from IPLTracker’s 2023 season page, computed by the CricketLogic engine from ball-by-ball data.