Taking Indian Cricket Forward - Part 2

SYSTEM – Tournaments

The Ranji Trophy is India’s prime tournament and the traditional pride of India in relation to Cricket. It also is the 4-day league and the test of skills for youngsters as regards entry to TEST CRICKET is concerned.

Every domestic season shall with a curtain-raiser and so the Irani Trophy between the Ranji Champions and the Rest of India makes sense too. Australia for example has a T20 between ACA all-stars and the Australian Team as the curtain-raiser to the season.

You also have the Vijay Hazare Trophy which is the ODD tournament, a 50-over league tournament. This helps in finding talented limited over cricketers. Then you have the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy which tests the abilities in Cricket’s newest form i.e Twenty20 Cricket.

Now what is the need for tournaments like Duleep Trophy (Zonal 4/5-day games) and Deodhar Trophy (Zonal ODD games). The problem is not easy as it seems. One it is not well attended. Nobody watches it with Interest (even the selectors sometimes). Two it is not televised. Rarely people know what these are all about.

Comedies galore in India’s domestic system! Except the Ranji Trophy (where too many teams play) the rest are zonal leagues. It means that if you want to play for India in ODIs all a Tamil Nadu Cricketer wants to do is to thrash Karnataka, Kerela, Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad and Goa.(Vijay Hazare) If you are lucky enough then you have to play just two more games (semi final and final) against a similar qualifier from another Zone. (say Punjab or Mumbai or Bengal)

Is this enough for someone to be labeled as a top domestic ODI player? Yes you play the best in the semis and in the finals. But where is the equality? What the BCCI has done is to introduce a zonal ODD tournament (Deodhar) where there are only 4 games. A quarter final, two semifinals and a final!! What a compromise!

Now in case of a Zonal team say South, it is very difficult to leave out many! But you have to pick only 15! Tamil Nadu is one team which has been in top form in the last 3-4 seasons. But only 5-6 players play for South Zone. All 15 from Tamil Nadu can beat any zonal team on any given day. So where are the rest 9 players? Why can’t the BCCI extend the Vijay Hazare tournament by making sure 10 best teams (mentioned in the last blog) play others twice? Looks much better instead of playing against weaker teams once and in zones!

And make sure enough people watch it! Televise it! It’s well known how much BCCI collects from Neo Cricket as the price for telecasting International games! It will definitely be at least 5 times higher than what CA charges Channel -9 and ECB charges Sky Sports! So take measures to televise as many games as possible instead of just 2/3 games.

Another thing when it comes to telecasting is the use of separate channels. CA has Channel-9 for International games and FOX Sports for Domestic games. Aren’t there more than two Sports channels in India? There will be a clash between International games and domestic games calendar and domestic games are ignored. All this is because of having the same broadcaster for International and domestic cricket. I’m not saying that’s wrong. If such a situation happens then make sure it has a back up channel like Neo has Neo Sports to telecast domestic games! I know that’s what they are doing now but is that adequate?