The long and exciting journey is set to come to a close on Sunday with the Grand Finale between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Chennai Super Kings at the Wankhede Stadium—where it all started.

50 days on a pleasant ride and we saw six of the eight teams saying goodbye at different points of it but SRH and CSK were the two sides that stayed despite all the ups and downs and made it more enjoyable. These two will lock horns in the one last clash to decide the winner of the title race.

CSK came into the lague after serving a two-year ban and were laudable throughout the campaign under the stewardship of MS Dhoni. On the other hand, banned Australian opener David Warner's ouster from SRH had left a void in its captaincy role which was later filled by Kane Williamson, who brilliantly led the team to the final.

Both the teams had showed a glimpse of what was about to come by sticking to the top spots from the very beginning of the tournament. However, CSK had a balanced string of wins and losses while SRH somewhat lost the control in the end and lost four back-to-back matches before finally picking up perhaps their most important win in this tournament against Kolkata Knight Riders, on May 25.

Despite being the table-toppers, SRH had this one failure ruining their appreciable run and that is, their inability to overcome the CSK-shaped hurdle. They have faced each-other three times this season, twice in the league stage and once in the playoffs. On each of the three occasions, CSK got the better of their opponents.

The Hyderabad-based franchise will be desperate to put an end to CSK’s invincibility against them. And what could be more perfect a stage than this tournament’s final for Kane Williamson’s men to take that revenge.

Chennai Super Kings

After that nail-biting win over SRH in the Qualifier 1, Chennai had five long days to contemplate what went wrong with their approach that they had to struggle to chase a sub-par target despite having the finest batting line-up in the competition. If they really have done so, a tougher challenge might be waiting for SRH to say the least.

CSK are unlikely to tinker with the set of players who have worked as a unit and gave their best to help the team reach this stage.

Probable XI: Faf du Plessis, Shane Watson, Suresh Raina, Ambati Rayudu, MS Dhoni (C & wk), Dwayne Bravo, Ravindra Jadeja, Harbhajan Singh, Deepak Chahar, Shardul Thakur, Lungi Ngidi

Sunrisers Hyderabad

Their bowling has been clinical throughout the tournament and their total in the last game was also enough, thanks to the late heroics of Rashid Khan. But they do know that to prevent CSK from lifting that trophy, they’ll need to have way better contributions from the batters.