What once looked like stability now looks like structure under strain — and responsibility is harder to separate from influence. The IPL has never really traded in the kind of public needling that defines football management. Opposition coaches do not usually take sly digs at their peers the way Premier League managers do. Which is why Hemang Badani’s assessment of Stephen Fleming landed so sharply — and why, with Chennai Super Kings in visible decline, it now feels less like provocation than a challenge. Badani’s claim was blunt: CSK were not really being run by Fleming at all, but by MS Dhoni. Fleming, he suggested, was celebrated for a success he had not replicated elsewhere, while Dhoni remained Chennai’s true cricketing brain, its “kingpin” and “maharaja”. At the time, it was easy to dismiss that as incendiary. Now it sits more uncomfortably. Because the question around Chennai is no longer simply why they are losing. It is who this failure belongs to. For years, CSK existed in a structure where everything — tactically, emotionally, symbolically …