By the time he was trapped lbw by Jalaj Saxena at the Saurashtra Cricket Association Ground in Rajkot on a warm Saturday morning in March, Yash Dubey had batted for 881 minutes and faced 591 balls. The 23-year-old, who was opening the innings for the first time in his career, had made 289.
It was a monumental innings, without which Madhya Pradesh would not have been able to pile up 585 for nine (declared) against Kerala in that Ranji Trophy league match. With his heroic effort, Dubey had batted Kerala out of not just that league match but the tournament as well.
Some three months later, Dubey would play another significant innings, in the final of the Ranji Trophy against Mumbai at Bengaluru. His 133 laid the foundation for another 500-plus score for Madhya Pradesh, which went on to win the match by six wickets and claim its maiden Ranji Trophy title. (Holkar won the Ranji Trophy four times in the 1940s and early 1950s before it was dissolved and replaced by a Madhya Bharat team, which later became part of the Madhya Pradesh team).
Madhya Pradesh’s triumph and Dubey’s innings at Rajkot tell us a great deal about the Ranji Trophy. Even the career of the bowler who denied him what had looked an almost inevitable triple hundred tells us something about Indian cricket’s premier domestic tournament.
Madhya Pradesh isn’t the only underdog to lift the Ranji Trophy in recent times. In the tournament’s previous edition (2019-20), Saurashtra was the champion. In 2016-17, Gujarat was the winner, and a year later, it was Vidarbha’s turn. Gujarat and Vidarbha, too, were kissing the Ranji Trophy for the first time.
In the 88-year history of the tournament, Mumbai has been the champion 41 times, 15 of which were part of a stunning streak of successive titles from 1958-59 to 1972-73. It has contested the final on six other occasions. Two other powerhouses of Indian cricket, Karnataka and Delhi, have been champions eight and seven times respectively.
So when teams with less strong traditions in cricket such as Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh (the champion in 2005-2006) go on to win the Ranji Trophy, that shows the game is growing across the country. That fact is reflected in the composition of the Indian team, especially beginning with the M.S. Dhoni era.
Amol Muzumdar, Mumbai’s coach and its run-machine during his playing days, believes the BCCI can take credit for the drastic improvement in the domestic game, having built the infrastructure around the country. “Every team [in the Ranji Trophy] has got a structure to it and every team has the infrastructure,” he says. “There is a system in place and it is working for every team.”
Better facilities
True, these days you can find excellent grounds in lesser known places such as Dindigul (Tamil Nadu), Krishnagiri (Kerala), Lahli (Haryana) or Kalyani (Bengal). The grounds are well-maintained and many of them have other facilities, such as gyms, too.
But the kind of wickets you come across may not always be suitable for quality cricket. If Dubey could have been tempted to set up home on that wicket in Rajkot, there are also square turners, where lasting 15 minutes is an achievement for a top-order player.
Because of such pitches — made by the host associations to help their teams win — the BCCI had even tried conducting Ranji matches at neutral venues. That experiment did not quite work, though.
Not that you don’t find sporting wickets for Ranji games. For instance, the wickets at Rajkot for the matches before the decider between Kerala and Madhya Pradesh were excellent, and among the best on the domestic circuit: they encouraged both the bowlers and the batters with the right technique and temperament.
But unfortunately, for what would prove the most important contest of the group, there was a wicket on which the first innings of the team batting second was not completed.
Muzumdar offers a solution. “Let the Ranji games be played over five days, instead of four,” he says. That, he thinks, will take the pitch out of the equation.
“Once the fifth day is added, you will not have to worry about the pitch, it will deteriorate on its own and the spinners will come into play. And our domestic cricket lacks quality spinners. In red-ball cricket, I cannot see anyone beyond R. Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja.”
The Ranji Trophy has changed in so many ways since Muzumdar’s days. Earlier, it was played on a zonal basis. So you had teams like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka competing in the South Zone or Mumbai and Maharashtra battling it out in the West Zone, with the top teams qualifying for the knock-out stage. That meant fewer games, but after the teams were divided into groups irrespective of the region, everybody began to get more games. In the pre-COVID seasons, a team would get at least eight games, even if it didn’t make it to the knock-out stage.
“They opted for the current system because earlier there could be a couple of good players in a weaker side and limited opportunities would not allow them to showcase their talents,” says former India opener W.V. Raman, who forced his way into the national squad with his big scores in the South Zone Ranji Trophy.
There was considerably less money in domestic cricket at that time. You hardly could have entertained thoughts of making a living by merely being a domestic cricketer. After the increase in remuneration announced by the BCCI last year, a cricketer gets paid between ₹40,000 and ₹60,000 per day. So from just one Ranji match, a player can earn up to ₹2,40,000.
Diverse match-ups
Playing more games is beneficial for players — and not just financially. “The current format is far better because not only do you get more games but you also get to play different teams, unlike the zonal system when you played the same teams every season,” says Jalaj, one of India’s finest all-rounders, who made his Ranji debut for Madhya Pradesh in 2005-06 and then moved to Kerala.
He is one of those unfortunate players who have not been able to make the national team despite a stellar career in First Class cricket (6,368 runs at an average of 35.57 and 360 wickets at 26.91). Muzumdar thinks Ranji Trophy performances should be rewarded, citing the example of Sarfaraz Khan, who scored 982 runs at an average of 122.75 and hit four hundreds this season. And his career First Class average is 81.61 after 25 matches.
“The form won’t last life-long,” points out Muzumdar, who believes a player has to be picked when in form. And he knows it; he went through several purple patches but had to end his career as one of the finest batters never to have played for India (11,167 runs in First Class cricket).
Raman played 11 Tests and 27 ODIs for India. The Ranji Trophy was his primary ‘preparation’ for international cricket. “We didn’t have the ‘A’ matches, the Duleep Trophy was a level higher than the Ranji Trophy, but the gap with international cricket was huge,” he recalls.
Raman is happy with the way things are in the Ranji Trophy at the moment. Dav Whatmore, the World Cup-winning coach from Australia, once told this writer that First Class cricket in India was as good as in any other country. But he said DRS had to be introduced and that the averages from the Plate division were inflated.
There have been concerns that many domestic players are keener about white-ball cricket in this IPL era. “Even junior cricketers now want to concentrate on power-hitting,” says Biju George, a Thiruvananthapuram-based coach who has an eye for catching them young (Sanju Samson is among his wards). He, however, ensures that they learn how to play the ball along the ground first.
And there are men, like Muzumdar, who continue to remind the kids of such things at the National Cricket Academy and elsewhere. “If the Ranji Trophy is strong and competitive, Indian cricket will be strong and competitive,” he says. “It is the nursery of Indian cricket.”
