Image Credit- PTI
The 2023-24 Ranji
Trophy ended with Mumbai beating Vidarbha in the final to lift their 42nd
title. Here are the takeaways from the season.
A Better Schedule
Shardul Thakur drew
attention to the demanding Ranji Trophy schedule, which has just a three-day
break between games, earlier this month. Fast bowlers in particular suffer
greatly from the schedule since they have little time for rehabilitation.
Can the BCCI extend the break to four days for the second half? Indeed, but it
will extend the season more. The 2023–24 season ran from the end of June until
the middle of March. One potential option put out by Rahul Dravid was that
“maybe we need to re-look and see whether some of the tournaments that we
are conducting are necessary.” While Dravid did not name the specific
tournaments he was referring to, it is possible that he was thinking of the
50-over zonal tournament, the Deodhar Trophy. It was first brought back by the
BCCI this season after being absent from 2019–20.
Scheduling games
during January and the first part of February in northern India was another
problem. Nine games had to be cancelled before a side could take a lead in the
first inning due to the excessive amount of play caused by the fog that existed
there throughout that season.
Sunil Joshi, the head coach of Uttar Pradesh, also proposed a straightforward
fix: avoid scheduling games in the north during the first part of the
competition.
DRS Implementation
The BCCI introduced
“limited DRS” for the Ranji Trophy semifinal and final in 2019–20.
Since it lacked UltraEdge and ball-tracking, only half of the issue was
resolved. With the full version for the final in 2022–2023, the board advanced
even farther.
The complete DRS was accessible for the final this time around, but only for
the one semi-final—Mumbai vs. Tamil Nadu—that was televised. After Madhya
Pradesh lost to Vidarbha in the other semi-final due to a few incorrect calls,
their coach Chandrakant Pandit suggested that the BCCI apply the rules
consistently.
In the final, as many as ten decisions were overturned on review. The board
should look into having full DRS for all the knockout games, as a wrong
decision can not only impact the result but also hamper a player’s career.
The Plate League issue
“The only way
we can attract attention, if at all that is possible at this level, is by doing
things differently.” This was Hyderabad captain Rahul Singh, talking about
his team being relegated to Plate League for this season.
He was not in error.
It was hard to assess Hyderabad’s performances because they were always going
to be superior than the other Plate League teams. They therefore had to take
extreme action. Rahul amassed 694 runs at an average of 86.75 and a strike percentage
of, get this: 134.49 by the end of the tournament.
In a similar vein, Tilak Varma averaged 137.33 while scoring three hundreds and
a fifty in five innings. The first people to acknowledge that the Elite Group
would not have been the same would be the players.
This has been a
problem ever since the BCCI added nine new clubs to the domestic cricket league
in 2018–19. One way to address this issue would be for the five teams from the
northeast zone—Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Sikkim—to
play each other in June before sending a unified team to compete for the Ranji
Trophy. If not, the BCCI will have to wait until they catch up to more
experienced teams.
Neutral Curators
This season, every
pitch was signed off by a neutral curator, which meant there were fewer extreme
surfaces.
“Some of the pitches were flat, which I suppose is fine,” Unadkat
said. “But in terms of the balance between bat and ball, I think plenty of
it was restored. There were one or two problematic pitches, but the neutral
curators ensured wickets were largely good.”