How will it affect selection for the Border Gavaskar Trophy and why will North India get games earlier?
Deivarayan Muthu and Vishal Dikshit10-Oct-2024Ranji Trophy with timeoutThe Ranji Trophy will be played in two phases this time, with the 20-over Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and the 50-over Vijay Hazare Trophy sandwiched in between. There are quite a few reasons behind the Ranji season being split including minimising weather-related disruptions especially in northern India as well as to look after players’ workloads and manage better the fitness of fast bowlers.Each team will play five league games during a five-week window between October-November before the focus shifts to the two white-ball competitions. Several players, especially fast bowlers, have endorsed the first-class tournament being split into two phases because it could potentially facilitate better recovery.Related
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After going through the grind of five Ranji Trophy league matches, the fast bowlers could attune their bodies to bowl shorter spells in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, which will begin on November 23, and then steadily ramp up their load and prep again for the second phase of the Ranji Trophy, which will commence on January 23, 2025, five days after the final of the Vijay Hazare Trophy. As for the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, it will conclude on December 15.Last season, when many teams had just a three-day break between Ranji matches, Mumbai allrounder Shardul Thakur was critical of the schedule, saying “there will be a lot of injuries across the country”. The BCCI has taken the suggestions from the players and coaches on board introducing an extra day’s gap between matches for better workload management in the forthcoming season.While the focus will move quickly to the white-ball tournaments, the initial leg of the Ranji holds a lot of significance for several players on the fringes of national selection. The selectors would be keenly following the initial rounds with an eye on both the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia as well as the shadow red-ball tour by India A which will be played between October 31 to November 10.Players for whom this season could mean a big dealAs far as India selection is concerned, this Ranji season could be particularly significant for the likes of Ishan Kishan, Shreyas Iyer, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Ruturaj Gaikwad and B Sai Sudharsan.After having lost their central contracts in February earlier this year, both Iyer and Kishan are back in the domestic mix in their quest to return to India’s Test team. While Kishan marked his domestic return with 111 off 126 balls in the Duleep Trophy in Anantapur, Iyer has made three fifties in his last four first-class games, including a first-innings 57 in Mumbai’s Irani Cup win.Notable player transfers
Mandeep Singh – from Punjab to Tripura
Wriddhiman Saha – from Tripura to Bengal
B Aparajith – from TN to Kerala
Rajneesh Gurbani – from Vidarbha to Maharashtra
Kuldeep Sen – from TN to MP
R Samarth – from Karnataka to Uttarakhand
Meanwhile, Easwaran, Gaikwad and Sudharsan are in a three-way race for the reserve opener’s slot for the tour of Australia. If recent form is anything to go by, Easwaran has pulled ahead with three centuries in his last four innings, including his 191 in the Irani Cup. He will feature in his 100th first-class game, at home, in the second round before he potentially boards the flight for India A’s tour of Australia.Don’t forget the old horses: Pujara and RahaneBy picking 60 of the “finest players” from the country [as was stated in the BCCI release] for the four Duleep Trophy squads last month, the Ajit Agarkar-led election committee had chalked out the pool of players they were keeping tabs on and grooming for the near future. And even though there is a tour of Australia around the corner, they left out two batters who played massive roles in winning the last two Test series there – Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. Both are 36, both coming off fairly successful county stints in the UK, and now both will get back to the platform budding players use to vault to the Indian team.Cheteshwar Pujara currently has 20,899 first-class runs•PTI They have barely anything left to prove in domestic cricket with nearly 21,000 first-class runs to Pujara’s name and over 13,500 to Rahane’s, along with Ranji titles in recent years, and all the respect they can earn in the domestic circuit with their feats . Yet, it is their passion for the game that will bring them back in the whites in this October heat. It could also be certain personal goals, perhaps the fading dream of playing 100 Tests for Rahane – like he had said last season – but it is India’s domestic circuit that becomes richer with their presence at the end of the day as it makes the tournament more competitive and worth following for the big names.Scheduling tweaks – north India first, the rest later The last Ranji season had commenced on January 5, in the extreme and biting cold of many parts of India, after the white-ball tournaments had concluded. Not surprisingly, many red-ball games were affected by weather interruptions such as fog and bad light. There were a fair few games in the early rounds where not a single ball was bowled on the first day in Meerut, Mohali and Chandigarh which irked the home teams as it poured water on their chances of progressing to the next round. There were several hours of play lost in Lahli, Jammu, Delhi, Kanpur, Mullanpur and other cities as well.When the first leg kicks off this time – October 11 to November 16 – a bulk of the matches will be held in Srinagar, Delhi, Dharamsala, Lucknow, Rohtak, Chandigarh, Shillong, Dehradun and Mullanpur before the winter season kicks in properly, and they’re unlikely to get interrupted by poor weather. That will bring respite to the host teams like Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, Services, Uttarakhand and Punjab, and give them a chance to play completed matches instead of seeing out forced draws. For the second leg in January, hardly any matches have been slotted for north India when the race for the knockouts heats up.The knockouts will be played from February 8 to March 2.