Empty Chairs at Ranji, Full Bids at the Auction: The Ledger of an Uncapped Player

On a November afternoon at the Saurashtra Cricket Association Stadium in Rajkot, the tin roof of the press box shed its heat first, then its silence. Down below, an opener was turning his wrists in the second innings, and the ball was leaving a line in the grass the way a finger draws through dust. The crowd would not have crossed three hundred, and half of them had been called there by the players' families. I wrote one thing in my old notebook that day: when the scoreboard operator changed the run tally, he wiped his spectacles first, then pressed the button. Across four days of cricket, he was the only man who stayed awake throughout.

That scene is not a metaphor for decline. It is a ledger entry, and I have been writing it for eighteen years. When the first franchise auction gavel fell in 2026, I assumed domestic cricket's bulb would not go out — only that its wiring would be re-routed. What happened is that the wiring was re-routed and the bulb went out anyway. The Ranji Trophy is still played, still drains more than 700 players every season, but its broadcast presence is like the guest room of an old house: visitors arrive, and the chair stays empty. Nobody remembers when the league phase ended until knockout week.

Look at this season's IPL auction panel. The word 'uncapped' is no longer a cricketer's achievement; it is his identity. A boy who made three hundreds in four months has his name flashed on screen when a franchise bidder raises a paddle — not when he made the hundred. The real transfer that took place was not of players. It was of visibility — and visibility no longer gets manufactured outside the auction room.

I understood this first in 2026, when I filed 1,200 words on a 23-year-old substitute at DY Patil Stadium in Mumbai whom nobody had photographed. That piece drew twenty times the readers my print reporting ever had. I left the print desk and accepted that the story lives where the camera cuts away. But that same year I saw something else — the same boy was on the bench the following season, because his contract was being decided not by his form but by his age and his agent.

Let me be plain here, because sympathy arrives fast and reporting arrives late. The Ranji Trophy's irrelevance is not caused by a shortage of talent — it is caused by a selection system where the zonal selector has been replaced by the franchise scout, and the scout's job is not to develop a player but to buy him cheap. A scout does not sit through a four-day game; he watches T20 footage, clocks the speed gun, and decides in three minutes. Which is why a fast bowler who learns to take wickets in his twelfth over after bowling forty in four days becomes 'slow' in the auction's eyes.

Watching matches across many seasons, I have tracked one pattern that repeats every year. Put the domestic tournament's top run-scorer and top wicket-taker lists beside the national squad list. The overlap between them has thinned steadily over the last decade. That is not coincidence. It is the product of a system in which domestic performance is no longer evaluated inside domestic cricket. When the yardstick is made outside, the ground inside empties out.

Now the part I am asked about least and am angriest about. On 2 November 2026, at DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, the Indian women's team won the World Cup. That night I assumed the next step would take itself — the WPL broadcast calendar would widen, the domestic women's tournament would get prime time, and the next generation of girls would be shown a full season, not a highlight reel. What had happened by June 2026 fell short of that hope. The calendar grew, but the way an extra room is added to an old house — bigger from outside, not airier from within.

This is where I have to fight my own profession's oldest habit. In 2026, on a night in Hyderabad, my chief sub cut my 450-word report to 90 words and kept the monsoon puddle holding the floodlight. I taped that cutting inside my first notebook. I learned then: observe first, explain second, never let a number stand alone. Thirty years on, the rule holds. Ninety words, ninety minutes: the cut taught me they are the same clock.

But in this piece I want to resist the habit that catches people like me easiest — letting old tape, Doordarshan years and 1990s memory become the centre of the story. Memory is my richest archive, and therefore my most dangerous. This piece has to stand in today's date.

And here is the uncomfortable bit. Assuming that television coverage will fix Ranji is a belief I have repeated three times and found wrong all three times. Broadcast does not merely grant visibility; it sets a price. The day every Ranji match is on camera, it too will speak the auction's language — 'good product', 'good stock'. The danger is not that domestic cricket is invisible. The danger is that it becomes visible on terms it did not choose.

This season I added a new column to my notebook — 'who did not play'. After every Ranji match I write down who was left out of the eleven and why. That column will never be published, and perhaps that is what makes it the most honest thing I write.

I found the sentence in the 87th minute, where there is no room for adverbs. At forty-three I learned that late is just a clock with better stories. At fifty-five I suspect the real question is not when domestic cricket returns. It is: when it does, who will be running its scoreboard? Someone wiping his spectacles, or someone raising a paddle? By the end of this season I do not have the answer. And I do not want to give it in a hurry.