The Board's Silence and Ranji's Quiet: The Half-Truth of Indian Cricket the Scorecard Never Tells

Twenty-six January morning, Kolkata. The Eden Gardens press box was empty. Three chairs, three microphones, one announcement — "The press conference has been postponed." No date, no reason, no number to call back on. I sat there, because for twenty-seven years this is what I have been learning — the fastest ball in cricket never hits the stumps. It comes from the boardroom, and it comes quietly.

Nothing happened on the pitch that day that any newspaper would print the next morning. But in my second notebook — the one I keep at every match, one for the game, one for the person — one line was written that day: "Whatever was not said was the biggest story."

The team that is never picked

The hardest team in Indian cricket is not the one that plays a World Cup final. The hardest team is the one that is never picked. The second XI. The second choice. The list that gets made before every series and never gets printed.

I have watched this for three decades. In the nineties there were zonal selectors — five zones, five schools of thought, and one player from each zone because that zone had not been picked last time. Five players from western India could never play together, even if the Ranji team out there was making the final every year. Selection was politics, and politics ran the way elections run — secret ballot, then two lines for the press.

Then came the IPL. Two thousand eight. The team's name changed, the selector's chair was taken by a scout, and the zone was replaced by a purse bid. I was in an auction hall in Bangalore that year, third row, where the air-conditioning was too loud and there was no water to be had. An eighteen-year-old — from Madhya Pradesh, whose name I had never heard before that day — sold for one crore forty lakh. Four months earlier the same boy had been batting for three days in a Ranji Plate Group final, with no TV coverage, no statistician, and a scorer who had only a register.

That evening I wrote two things. First, that India's bench strength is not a talent problem. It is a selection problem. Second, that the true casualty of the IPL revolution was not Test cricket. The true casualty was the relevance of the Ranji Trophy.

I will not write the word relevance three times. But counting the word tells you where we stand.

Fifty overs, and an answer that never came

Let's go back to the morning nets. Chepauk, April, six in the morning. Three spinners orbit a twenty-six-yard pitch. Behind them is a coach in his fifties, hands in his trouser pockets, saying nothing.

In that long commotion of fifty overs I always look for one thing — the answer that Ranji cricket never gives. A first-class spinner who takes sixty wickets in two of three seasons is roughly entitled. But the Indian Test side has two spots for spin, and both have been in an age-bound hold for over seven years.

I made a small calculation of the last four seasons — the top twenty-five wicket-takers in Ranji. Average age around twenty-eight to twenty-nine. Three of four cross sixty wickets every season. And yet how many of them got a Test cap? The answer in my register is six out of seventy-four. This is not only about spin — it is about the whole system.

And I am not printing that number only because it looks sharp. I am printing it because I remember the man who was not among those six. A middle-order batsman from Karnataka whose first-class average had climbed to nearly fifty-five, and whom no franchise bought until the last round that year. He belonged to no team. He belonged to no market. He was simply a good cricketer, and being a good cricketer is no longer enough.

The next season he batted at number seven for Madhya Pradesh. Nobody picked up his file.

What the board does not say

Now the section I write with the most distaste — and the most necessity.

I became a journalist around the two thousand match-fixing affair. Two thousand thirteen spot-fixing and the Lodha Committee report that followed it. Two thousand twenty and the change of ownership. Every time the same pattern — the board goes quiet, and a whole generation of Indian cricket journalists turns that silence into "according to sources".

I do not say every silence hides something. Sometimes silence is just incapacity, sometimes delay, sometimes legal advice. But I do say the journalist should tell the reader which silence is which. In Marathi — कोणतं मौन काय आहे, हे सांगायला पत्रकार आहे.

Last December a radio rights deal was signed for a new franchise. I called three people — a corporate communications head, a media rights consultant, a former official. All three said, "I'll call back." All three did not. I did not write that they were hiding something. I wrote: three calls, three promises, zero call-backs. That is journalism — naming the document, the date, and where possible the person who did not call back.

But the harder question is the one I ask myself, and that every Indian cricket journalist should ask: are we covering the board, or working for it? If your first question on auction day is "the purse", and there is no third question — you know the answer.

The other half that plays the second innings

And here comes the biggest gap in my register.

I watched the two thousand seventeen Women's World Cup final — Lord's, one hundred thirty thousand spectators, the last over of India's innings. Before that, how many times had I filled an interview form for a women's player? Count it — four times in an entire career. As a journalist, that is my account, and it is shameful.

Then the WPL came. Two thousand twenty-three. Mumbai, Brabourne, seven in the evening. For the first time I saw a thousand of my four thousand newsletter subscribers read coverage of a women's match — and those thousand were people who had never read a football column. The language changed, the audience changed, the questions changed. A small girl, twenty years old, from Haryana, who won four matches in the first season; I had to hear her name from my five-year-old son, because she was on YouTube.

What happened after eighteen eighty-three happened for the boys. The two thousand twenty-five home World Cup can do the same for the girls. But that will only happen if the broadcast promises made in the trophy speech are kept. Two and a half years ago I asked a television official how much of the women's domestic matches would be broadcast live. The answer was, "under consideration." Still under consideration. No document, no date, no name. Not yet.

Counter-intuitive: what is missing from our memory

Now the turn where I have to quarrel with myself.

After every series we ask the same question: who will break Sachin's record, Virat's average, Rohit's six. Our collective memory is made of records, not situations. And in that one habit half our cricket intelligence is buried.

An example. Some batsman makes a hundred and fifty not out and the next day's page begins with his name. But the truth of that innings was that he was playing against an elite spinner, his feet had slowed, and he had to play at a strike rate of two hundred eighty because no one held the other end. The innings was built of necessity, not elegance. But its story has a hero who made the runs, not one who created the situation.

The reverse is equally true — we turn 'the team lost' into 'one player's mistake'. Three times in the last two and a half years I have written this. First time it proved right, second time wrong, third time I never found out.

Here is a technical thing I do not want to hide from the reader. Building a scouting model out of Ranji averages and IPL strike rates, year on year, is as unreliable as saying the weather next Tuesday will be in the same direction as today's wind. It is thirty per cent true — and in the other seventy per cent there is a boy on that pitch who achieved his success by playing thirty thousand times against one bowler in his childhood. The model does not see him. The model only sees what has been written. And out of cricket's seventeen hundred ninety thousand first-class innings, we have not fully written any of them.

What I learned from Nizhny Novgorod

One anecdote, once — because I do not want this article to become a cupboard of my memory.

Two thousand eighteen, Russia, football World Cup. I was not there for cricket news — I was there because the newsletter's subscribers were growing and I needed to leave my comfort zone. In Nizhny Novgorod, France beat Uruguay two-nil, after rain, in a stadium where there was not a single Indian player. That was the night I began my second notebook — the one that holds the person, not the game.

So when I see an eighteen-year-old on the pitch, I keep two things together: one hard number, and one dissent. One contrary quote from his coach or scout, saying he is not there yet. That discipline I learned in Nizhny Novgorod — and it still, I don't know why, comes in most useful in the empty press box at Eden Gardens.

Twenty-five per cent young, and an open question

This year several franchises have brought down their squad's average age to as low as this. Reports will write that the team has become "young". But the question is: is a twenty-year-old boy young if he is only playing four matches? Or is he young when he gets twelve matches a season, two times out, one innings with the bat, one late-night flight to an unknown city — and then a fresh start next year?

Whenever I eat bread with the player who has just been picked, the question remains the same: do you want to play, or do you want to be on TV? He laughs. Nobody knows. The board does not say either. And I write that silence.

At the start of this article there were three chairs, three microphones, one announcement. At the end of the article the same thing is written — because the news did not change, only the date did.

And one thing the press box taught me is that a match is not two hours or five days or a three-week career. The press box taught me that every final remains unfinished before it is finished — and writing that unfinishedness is the only game I still play in the tune of the nineties.

Incidentally, there is an empty space in my second notebook for next month. One line to remember on it — that every scorecard is not a whole story; it is only the part that was counted. The rest is there where no selector was and no one wrote.

Which selector did not call next, that is still to be found out. I will write the answer as soon as it comes.