BackEssay | End of an innings?
Fans once had to troop to Ranji Trophy matches when they wanted to watch the best players display their skills; they no longer need to do so
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Only a few hundred spectators were sprinkled around Wankhede Stadium on 28 January as Mumbai demolished Saurashtra to win the Ranji Trophy yet again. These matches used to draw massive crowds, but are now usually played in empty stadiums, with stray applause echoing around the deserted stands. There was a slightly better turnout the previous day, when Mumbai opener Wasim Jaffer became the highest run getter in the tournament history as well as the person to score the maximum number of Ranji Trophy centuries. It was a Sunday when Jaffer was at the crease, and the man who gave him company for some time from the other end was Sachin Tendulkar. Both reasons, especially the latter, helped pull in a few thousands for a couple of hours. Then the eerie silence reigned once again.
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Despite these early hiccups, the Ranji Trophy eventually became the main showcase of Indian cricketing talent. The golden era was undoubtedly between 1956 and 1985. Bombay (as Mumbai was then called) won in 23 of these 30 years, including an unbelievable 15-year winning streak between 1959 and 1973. The only comparable example of dominance on the cricket field was when Surrey won the English county championship for seven consecutive years between 1952 and 1958. Yorkshire won seven times in the 1930s, but never more than thrice in a row.
The second reason is that the old Ranji Trophy matches were a route to pass on local cricketing traditions. In Bombay, the mantle of technically-sound batting passed seamlessly from Vijay Merchant to Vijay Manjrekar to Ajit Wadekar to Sunil Gavaskar to Vengsarkar to Tendulkar. That is over six decades. The lack of top cricketers in the tournament these days chokes this pipeline of tradition.
I am told that the sheer presence of Tendulkar in the Mumbai dressing room this year has offered important lessons to the younger players, including the fact that they should be at the nets on time and take every practice session seriously. Youngsters from the teams that played Mumbai this season have also sought out the great man for advice.
As one final reminder of how much the Ranji Trophy meant for Indian cricket, here is an anecdote recounted by Gavaskar. He was a schoolboy when Bombay met Mysore in a semi-final in 1967. Ajit Wadekar scored a famous 323 while Dilip Sardesai scored 111. They faced two of the greatest spinners the world has ever seen—Prasanna and Chandrasekhar. “It was a great sight for a student like me who was trying to get into cricket. Two outstanding players of spin bowling and two outstanding spin bowlers were trying to get on top of each other." Prasanna loved to toss up the ball, and the quicksilver footwork of Sardesai was better suited to dealing with him. Wadekar found Chandrasekhar easier to bat to. “The result was a massive partnership and it was as good a contest between the bat and the ball that one could have hoped to see," writes Gavaskar in a pen portrait of Prasanna.
There are still many talented players appearing in the Ranji Trophy. The classically-correct Jaffer is but one example. But the glory days are gone, perhaps forever.
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