The Grind That Still Builds Them: Why the Ranji Trophy Matters in the Franchise Age

The result that should have led every cricket bulletin in the country was instead tucked in beneath the franchise noise, where the franchise noise lives by right of sheer volume. In late February, on a ground in Hubballi, Jammu & Kashmir won the Ranji Trophy for the first time in their history. A side with no pedigree whatever in the long format, ending a wait stretching back more than six decades, did it by dethroning Karnataka — my old state, and one of the most decorated names the competition has known — in a final settled the old-fashioned way, on a first-innings lead, after five days in which the trophy changed hands not on a single thunderclap of a shot but on the patient accumulation of a fortnight’s better cricket. Paras Dogra, a domestic veteran of precisely the kind the franchise game tends to discard long before his work is done, lifted it. I felt the defeat as a Karnataka man; I felt the romance as a cricketing one, and the romance won comfortably.

We are told, gently and without pause, that this competition is a relic — that the future belongs to the franchise, the three-hour spectacle and the auction paddle, and that the Ranji Trophy survives on sentiment and the inertia of a board that cannot quite bring itself to switch off the lights. I want to make the unfashionable case for it. The long domestic grind is not the museum piece of Indian cricket; it is the engine room of everything the country still does well in the longest format, and we are running it down at a cost that will not show on any balance sheet until it is far too late to make the loss good.

Begin with what the grind actually builds, because it is precisely the thing the franchise game cannot. A four-day match on a wearing surface in Rajkot in January, watched by a few hundred souls and one thoroughly bored dog, asks a young batsman a question that twenty overs under lights will never put to him: can you do this for six hours? Can you leave the ball you do not need to play; can you bat through the second new ball with the score becalmed and your throat dry; can you find runs when the field has been set specifically to starve you and not one bowler is offering the width that the shortest format hands out like a welcome drink? Temperament of that order is not taught in a classroom or bought at an auction. It is forged, ball by unwatched ball, in exactly these unglamorous places.

It is the same for the bowler. The franchise game asks him for four overs and a clear head; the Ranji Trophy asks him for a fourth and a fifth spell on the same unhelpful afternoon, for the discipline to bowl a side out on the final day rather than merely to keep one quiet for twenty-four deliveries. The seamer who learns to nurse a tiring body through a long second innings, the spinner who learns to buy a wicket rather than rent a dot ball — these are Test-match skills, and they are domestic skills first. No country has ever produced a fine Test side without a serious first-class competition beneath it, and none ever will. The national team is only ever as deep as the grind that feeds it.

And then there is the romance, which is not a soft word here but a structural one. Jammu & Kashmir’s triumph is the system working exactly as it was built to: a path that runs from a maidana with no spectators to the highest table in the domestic game, open to anyone good enough and stubborn enough to walk it. That a state long synonymous with everything except cricketing pedigree could assemble eleven men and beat the establishment over five days, on merit, with no shortcut available and none taken — that is close to the most democratic thing in Indian sport. The auction enriches the few already anointed; the Ranji Trophy still, now and then, anoints the unknown. It is the whole difference between a lottery and a ladder.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it has a strong case. The domestic game’s troubles are real and they are not new: meagre match fees set against franchise contracts that can earn a man more in a fortnight than a decade of Ranji ever will; grounds so empty the fielders nearly outnumber the watchers; a calendar so congested that the red-ball competition is forever being shunted aside to make room for the white-ball windows that pay the bills. Young cricketers now quietly weigh whether a heavy Ranji season is even worth the wear and tear, when freshness for the auction is the more bankable asset. None of that is imagined, and none of it is the players’ fault. A man must feed his family, and we have built an economy that pays lavishly at one door and a pittance at the other.

But the conclusion that follows is to mend the grind, not to bury it. Pay the domestic professional a wage that reflects what he actually is — the raw material of the entire enterprise, the Test team’s nursery and its insurance policy at once. Give the Ranji Trophy a clear, unbroken window in the calendar instead of the scraps left over once the leagues have eaten their fill. Ask the franchises, which harvest the finished product, to owe something tangible back to the system that grew it for them. The domestic game is not failing because it has become obsolete; it is struggling because it has been neglected, and neglect is a choice that any administrator can reverse the moment he decides the long format is worth the trouble. To let it wither and then pronounce it dead would be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the laziest kind.

A career, like a single match, is finally judged on rather more than its loudest moments, and the truest ledger a cricketer owns is the one written slowly, across seasons, in the four-day game. I came up in the 1980s and 90s, when the Ranji Trophy was not one ladder among many but the only one there was, and I have never quite shaken the conviction that a man learns who he really is as a cricketer somewhere on the third afternoon of a match nobody is watching. Jammu & Kashmir in Hubballi is what the system produces when it is allowed to work as intended — not luck, not largesse, but a long apprenticeship rewarded at last. Build the grind, fund it, protect it, and it will keep handing the game its fairytales and its Test cricketers, which have always, on closer inspection, turned out to be the same thing. Trust instead to the auction to raise them for us, and one day we will look up from the spectacle to find we have quietly forgotten how to make a cricketer at all.