Three matches. Three drubbings. Chennai Super Kings (CSK) are the only side without a point in IPL 2026 so far. They have lost six games in a row at Chepauk now, stretching back to last season.
One player coming in can't change the fortunes of a team flagging as badly as this. But when that player is Dewald Brevis, there is hope. The 22-year-old South African middle-order dynamo was injured and didn't take part in any of CSK's first three games. He is likely to slot back in for their clash with Delhi Capitals on Saturday.
Brevis once used to be a hitter of great sixes, especially the no-look variety which breaks the internet. He has now evolved into a great six-hitter. Since the start of 2025, Brevis has blasted 144 of them in 1032 balls - a six every seven balls on average. Only one player - Sahibzada Farhan - has hit more sixes than him in this period.
The IPL invites immense pressure, but even in this, the biggest T20 league in the world, Brevis keeps raining down the big hits. He crashed 17 sixes in 125 balls in IPL 2025 - again, a six every seven balls on average. Most big-hitters these days tend to move away from the ball to generate swinging room and extra leverage. Brevis, though, has made himself dangerous by moving towards the ball and manufactures power by widening his base. He tucks his chin into his chest and makes those no-look step-hits ripe for Instagram reels.
At the recent SA20, Brevis showed signs that his game is built to deal with crises too. From 7 for 5, Brevis knuckled down and lifted Pretoria Capitals to 143 for 6 against Joburg Super Kings. That day he was working against Stephen Fleming, who couldn't do much but sit in the dugout and watch as one of the greatest rescue acts in the history of T20 cricket played out on the field. There has been only one other instance of a team winning a men's T20 after losing half their side with fewer than ten runs on the board.
"For a young guy, he brings experience," Fleming, now coaching Brevis at CSK, said. "But he's incredibly talented and I think to have worked out his game at such a young age, he obviously got opportunities early and then he dropped off as he was working out how he wanted to play.
"I'm sure there was a lot of advice during that time, but he's now come out of that cycle with real clarity as to the way he wants to play. It's aggressive, it's very skilful, and it's becoming consistent. So we value his inputs really highly. He's been a big miss since the start of the season."
Brevis was first earmarked as a player with a high ceiling after he topped the charts in the 2022 Under-19 World Cup. He broke into the IPL the same year. But after three seasons with Mumbai Indians, in which he played just ten games, scoring 230 runs at a strike rate of 133.72, he went unsold in the 2025 mega auction. That snub got to Brevis, but eventually he put it past him and levelled up to an extent that he's now in a league of his own. Last year, he was the only player with a strike rate of 180 against both pace and spin in T20s (min 250 balls faced against each type).
"When it came to SA20, I did grow a lot," Brevis told R Ashwin on the latter's YouTube channel. "Sourav [Ganguly, Pretoria Capitals head coach] was hard on me to just make sure you're there at the 20th over and at the start of the comp, I was figuring it out and trying to think too much about how to get there.
"If I just be in the moment, you'll find a way to get there and when you're there it gets dangerous. So, it's [about] allowing yourself to get to that point and that was really cool and that gave me a bit of calmness. You actually don't know how much time you actually have. Sometimes you can rush it, but you can score a lot of runs in the last four overs."
CSK could do with a lot of runs. Despite the absence of Brevis, they posted 200-plus scores in their two previous games. Brevis' elite six-hitting perhaps can take them up to 230. That might be CSK's best chance to plug the holes in their team and get on the board this season.