The 84th edition of Ranji Trophy will begin on Friday, featuring many India cricketers in action. This season will also see the return of the home and away format after the neutral venue experiment was scrapped earlier this year.
With India playing their next Test match on November 16, off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and batsman Cheteshwar Pujara will feature for their respective state teams till then in the country’s premier domestic tournament, reported PTI.
Besides Ashwin, Test opener Murali Vijay will further bolster Tamil Nadu, who play their season opener at home against Andhra Pradesh. Abhinav Mukund, India’s reserve opener in the recent Test series against Sri Lanka, will captain Tamil Nadu.
Pujara will captain Saurashtra in the absence of Jaydev Shah. Giving him company will be all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja, who is out of the Indian ODI and T20I squad.
Test keeper Wriddhiman Saha and pacer Mohammed Shami will turn up for Bengal in the team’s first-round match against Services at Palam.
Fast bowler Ishant Sharma will lead the Delhi squad, with Gautam Gambhir declining captaincy for the upcoming season. Sharma will be itching to perform after not getting a game in the three Test matches against Sri Lanka.
No more neutral venues
What makes the tournament more interesting this season is the return of the home and away format, after the failed experiment of neutral venues last year.
The move to play at neutral venues turned out to be a logistical nightmare, while big names like Mukund and Axar Patel also complained of apathy on the part of the state associations hosting the game.
Irfan Pathan, who is set to lead Baroda again, welcomed the return of the traditional format but said the neutral venue concept was worth a shot.
“If something new was not tried, then we would not have found out the issues in implementing it,” PTI reported the all-rounder as saying. “So it was a worth a try and my main issue with the move was that curators, in their attempt to stretch the game to four days, ended up preparing pitches where close to 800 runs were scored more often than not. So that was not good for cricket. Now we are back to the old format which is fantastic for the youngsters.”
This time, all teams will play equal number of matches with 28 sides divided into four groups. The top two in each pool will make the quarterfinals.
Additional weightage has also been given to the Ranji Trophy, with fringe India players told to be part of as many First-Class games as possible.
It is for this reason that Mumbai batsman Shreyas Iyer has been appointed India A captain only for the first three games of the five-match series New Zealand. After completing his India A duty, Iyer will travel to Indore for Mumbai’s opener against Madhya Pradesh on October 14.
It remains to be seen whether the tournament will produce another first-time winner like the previous season when Gujarat humbled 41-time champions Mumbai for their maiden title.
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