Indian domestic cricket - an envious feeder system with no real chasing pack

As I stepped into the office on Saturday morning, I couldn’t wait to switch on the TV to watch two of the finest domestic outfits, Mumbai and Tamil Nadu, locking horns at Chepauk in the fifth round of Ranji Trophy. K Sai Kishore was on a bowling spree, with already three wickets in the bag, and the first sentence that I uttered from my mouth that day - “Wow!! This guy is too good!” On another day, it would have been just a normal start to the day, with me filling my coffee mug, settling down to check my mails and proceed further to work on planned content but it felt a bit different that day. 

The likes of Venugopal Rao and Hanuma Vihari from Andhra Pradesh, Jai Prakash Yadav, Naman Ojha, and Amay Khurasiya from Madhya Pradesh, MS Dhoni, Varun Aaron, and Shahbaz Nadeem from Jharkhand, Ravindra Jadeja, Cheteshwar Pujara, and Jaydev Unadkat from Saurashtra ensured that the selection in the national team is no more a domain of few privileged states, with it becoming clear that the best ones, no matter the state they come from, will eventually be picked in the national team. 

Satiating the club loyalists, the fundamentals of domestic cricket has hardly undergone a metamorphosis in the United Kingdom. As a result, we have been presented with nothing but a series of unfortunate underperforming international stars, being completely out of touch when thrown into the deep end. In the last 10 years, the likes of Sam Robson, Adam Lyth, Ben Duckett, Mason Crane, Keaton Jennings, Tom Westley, Alex Hales, James Vince and Dawid Malan have all come with a lot of promise but we had been presented with nothing but absolute disasters at the top level. 

Even squaring the observational size a bit further, to the age-group level, India’s dominance at the global event tells the story. Ever since Mohammed Kaif led India to an Under-19 World Cup victory two decades ago, Virat Kohli, Unmukt Chand, and Prithvi Shaw helped the country to three more titles, with Priyam Garg being at the pole position to win one more over the course of the next one month. On the other hand, English county's football-academy-style player promotion failed to give them the regular four-day challenge that is required at a young stage. India have done it quite successfully over the years, with the Cooch Behar Trophy and Vinoo Mankad Trophy adding bricks to India’s success at the very fundamental level.

That said, India’s structure can be comparable to that of Shield cricket which is a proven one for a long long time. No infiltration of foreign players, keep it sane with the addition of the national team players and a proper two-round system make the structure one to be envious about. But with the population factor coming in, the Asian nation is surging ahead in the 21st century, leaving Australia to play catch up.

However, like every layered story, the bottom line comes down to the preferential treatment of facts. Well, in a country like India, it is always difficult to manage stuff in an organised manner. Yet we have rarely seen a mess-up, with 38 teams taking part in the Ranji Trophy and other age-group tournaments. This is colossal, this is massive and this is what the doctor ordered. 

The old maxim that “all that glitters are not gold” is the fundamental difference marker here. The colourful climate of England, counties, with their Kolpak and international recruits, have ensured that there is a certain vernacular charm to their style. But style and substance are two different things and who is better than England to understand it? This is exactly where India has scored over their counterparts as a successful cricketing nation in the last few years. They haven’t screamed from the rooftop nor got into the competition of selling tickets because the eventual aim is a much bigger and a more important one.