SERIES PREVIEW
Follow UsWhen the Cricket Association of Pondicherry (CAP) was inducted into the BCCI as an associate member in 2018, multiple challenges threatened to destroy their aspirations. First, it was the complaint about playing more than the permitted number of outstation players in the 2018 Vijay Hazare Trophy. Then, an ANI report disclosed how the Puducherry Planning Authority (PPA) asked the association to demolish unauthorized construction at the Siechem Stadium.
But Pondicherry Cricket has rolled on and how! While the same can’t be said about the cricket team’s performance - honestly, building a cricketing structure that competes with the big boys requires time - one would appreciate how the association has managed to produce multiple first-class stadiums in the city.
That they have six of them to host a tournament of Deodhar Trophy’s magnitude tells you how far they have come in the last five years to refute the statement, “Puducherry is so small, every time a six is hit there, it will land in Chennai. How many times will we have to return the ball?” made by a lawyer in the court.
Spread across six zones, Deodhar Trophy has returned to its original avatar after a gap of nine years. The last time it was in the Zonal format was back in 2014-15, when East Zone blew a star-studded West Zone into smithereens in the final to emerge victorious. Since then it has fiddled in multiple iterations, but the real zonal identity that made the competition what it is is eventually back.
There have been multiple schools of thought around it. The Lodha Committee recommendations - well, we still remember them - and the subsequent Committee of Administrators (CoA) found that having multiple zones creates a sense of uncalled for regionalism. Thus it had to go away.
The recent appointment of Ajit Agarkar as the Chairman of Selectors, when West Zone already had Salil Ankola in the committee, veered towards a sense of inclusiveness, but for the fairer interest of the sport, the zonal tournaments had much more value than the non-existent Red-Blue-Green or A-B-C structure. It added a spirit of competitiveness and context that was difficult to find in the earlier formats. As much as one would try to dispute it, the A-B-C structure advocated for more individual streak than outgoing team spirit.
It was on show in the Duleep Trophy. It was great theatre when West Zone broke into a synchronized clap, like the Que-Sera-Sera chant of Saurashtra. When R Sai Kishore launched Jayant Yadav for a six over long-on at the Chinnaswamy to guide South Zone to the final, one needed to be there to experience the jubilation. And when South Zone buried West Zone in the final to secure the Duleep Trophy after a decade, one could only be happy for Hanuma Vihari and Mayank Agarwal - two stars who held the side together with uncanny ease. That sense of belongingness defined the format, and in the time of so much radicalism, cricket found some context in a good way.
But the relevance of Prof. DB Deodhar Trophy this time is at an all-time high. With the World Cup just a couple of months away and the squad far from settled, this is an excellent opportunity for everyone to stake a claim. The varied landscape of Indian cricket has seen that there is no escaping the heat at any point and the arbitrariness of selections could come at any point in time. How would anyone not be interested in that?
Hence the likes of Mayank Agarwal, Venkatesh Iyer, Nitish Rana, Saurabh Tiwary, and Priyank Panchal would know why this matters. There’s a far bigger reason to be there with extreme competitiveness than just knowing it is just a space-filling program in India’s domestic calendar. There is a reason why 2023 is the earliest a domestic season has ever started in India and there’s a reason why it is the lengthiest of all time.
