The Liverpool Notebook: When the BCCI Calendar Steals the Ranji Headlines

A cold March morning in Liverpool. I opened my notebook on the out-field and found a line twelve years old: "One catch went down, and for fifteen seconds nobody on the field spoke to anybody else." I did not know it then, but those fifteen seconds would become the spine of my next two decades of reporting.

I have written cricket for fifty years. When I first walked into the Sportsweek office in 2026 as a law student at Bombay University, I thought the story of the game lived in the scoreboard. In 2026, after I bowled thirty-eight overs across two days for Lancashire's second XI against Warwickshire's seconds and my left foot went numb on the Monday, a scan at Broadgreen told me the field was closing. That evening I bought a two-hundred-page hardback notebook in Liverpool — and since then I have been writing what stands in front of the eyes, not what sits on the scoreboard.

Now we come to this season's Ranji Trophy, and the quiet condition the BCCI calendar has made for it.

Ranji used to be the country's longest sporting story. December to March, four months, the pulse of cricket rising from every corner of India — a spinner's fingers stuck to his thumb on a sand-baked ground in Bhuj, a batsman searching for his place on a dew-soaked pitch at Eden Gardens in the first morning light, and a ball that travelled three hundred miles to reach the newspapers from an unknown twenty-year-old's fingers at Chepauk.

In recent years, that picture has changed. The change is not only in coverage — it is in the weather of the tournament. Ranji's season is now scattered into disconnected sessions. One round in December, another in late January, a third in the first week of February. The first round finishes, and by then the first big block of the BCCI calendar — the domestic limited-overs series — has begun. Then come IPL auction preparations, foreign tours, national selection meetings. The second phase of the Ranji season is welcomed the way an old programme is welcomed — formally, without lights.

There is a paradox here worth seeing. It is said that the IPL did not kill Test cricket. This is both right and wrong. Test cricket is alive in India — people buy five-day tickets and sit in stadiums, and there are viewers on cable channels on the fifth morning. But the IPL has taken the light away from the Ranji Trophy and the pyramid beneath it. Before 2026, if a player could not make the Test team, selectors looked for his name in the Ranji scorecard. Now, if a player is returning from injury, he wants to play the IPL first, because that is where the spotlight is, and that is where the route back to the national team runs. Ranji has become a "fitness test" — a few days, a few overs.

In 2026, in the Sportsweek office, I wrote my first report showing where Mumbai's team was losing its strength — not through statistics, but through what people on the field were telling me. A senior batsman said quietly, "This time we don't even know when we are playing." That was the day I understood that a tournament does not die in a day — it dies in pieces, in sessions, in overs, in the sequence of the annual calendar.

Last December I was in India, sitting through five days of a Ranji match at a small ground in Rajkot. In the first session, the bowler was getting out-swing with the new ball, but the wind on that pitch was not helping — after three overs of testing, he changed his plan. I wrote in my notebook: "In the third over the seamer shortened his length. The reason for the change was not the captain's advice, but the direction of the wind." This is the thing I must keep writing — what is happening on the pitch is the real news.

But there was another thing in that match. On the fifth afternoon, when the game ended, there were about four hundred people in the stadium. Outside the pavilion I asked a fellow reporter, "Where will today's play be printed?" He said, "Maybe two columns in the evening paper." And in that moment a second line joined my notebook: "Outside the stadium a group of children stood waiting for a spinner's autograph. The spinner had taken no wicket in five days, but the children knew his name."

Now open the notebook where the rhythm broke. In my reporting, "rhythm" is not only the rhythm of bowling — it is the rhythm of the season that keeps a tournament alive. The day a tournament's calendar splinters, the internal temperature of a team changes. A player's mind behaves like a bowler's when he is asked to break his spell again and again. Ranji players now know their tournament "stops in the middle." That fact — whether selectors admit it or not — affects the mentality of the game. A boy who scores a half-century in January must wait four weeks for his next innings in February. In that empty time, a player's form slips like sand.

A Tamil Nadu coach once told me — I wrote it in my notebook years ago — "Ranji does not mean win or lose. Ranji means get up in the morning, go to the ground, and see what the pitch is saying." The day that daily rhythm breaks, that too breaks.

Third point: who the money serves. The BCCI has the largest TV and digital rights market in the world. The IPL auction has become an industry of its own — imagine, in February 2026, in a hotel ballroom in Mumbai, a ninety-second countdown was running and Chennai bought MS Dhoni for 1.5 million dollars. I was there for a British agency, with no front-row seat and a borrowed laptop. The biggest thing I saw there was not the money — it was the ninety seconds in which a stranger decides what a cricketer is worth.

After that day I started a separate ledger — "price versus temperament." To every player's averages I added what he did under pressure. The IPL auction is no longer a table of figures; it is a run of character judgments. In the 2026, 2026 and 2026 mega auctions I had to watch for exactly this.

But with Ranji, this ledger works in reverse. A Ranji player is not sold in an auction's ninety seconds — he is baked in a slow four-month tug. The BCCI calendar is reducing that baking time every year. Money has come into domestic cricket — match fees are up, medical facilities have improved, some state associations are paying attention to logistics. But the money is not going where the light should go — into coverage. Ranji knockout matches are televised; group matches are not. This is the coverage gap that the IPL did not create — the BCCI's broadcast agreements did.

When I came into journalism, it was not the batting average that mattered most but how a batsman played in a given situation. I remember in 2026, when I was a senior editor during Cricinfo's early digital expansion, an English reader emailed me: "Your match reports have less score and more the smell of the ground." I replied that I do write the score, but first I watch whose breath is failing on the pitch.

Here is a contrarian angle I must state. People say the IPL is responsible for Ranji's condition. I do not accept that directly. The IPL is a commercial product doing its job — providing entertainment. The real fault lies with a system that placed Ranji in front of the IPL but did not broadcast it the same way. This is a matter of broadcast politics. If the BCCI had the will, it could have brought Ranji's group stages onto digital platforms — at low cost, in regional languages. But that did not happen.

Regional-language commentary has done more to democratise cricket in this country than any grassroots programme. Commentary in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi has connected a new generation of viewers to the game. And the same logic should apply to Ranji. If you keep Ranji limited to English commentary and metro cities, you lose the widest part of your pyramid.

Fourth, and perhaps the most delicate point: the empty space of coverage. Over recent years I have counted the number of electronic media cameras at Ranji matches. Around 2026, a big match had two cameras — one main, one for replays. Now knockouts show six or seven cameras, but the group stage has not a single telecast. There can be no greater "invisible" measure. How will you write the story of a player no camera is watching?

This is where my notebook earns its keep. I am at the ground, I watch the bowler's fingers, I measure the fielder's half-step, I record the moment the crowd goes quiet. All of this is not for the statistics I write — it is to fill the absence of the statistics the cameras cannot show.

Once, at a Ranji match in Mumbai, I watched a young batsman say nothing for three balls, only shifting his stance. On the fourth ball he hit a six. I asked him afterwards, "What were you thinking in those three balls?" He smiled and said, "Nothing. I was just listening to the pitch." That is the answer that has become almost impossible in today's data age. Data will tell you he hit a six on the fourth ball, but not what the pitch was saying in the first three.

This is my "ninety seconds" lesson. The ninety seconds I watched at the 2026 Mumbai auction taught me what money thinks about a cricketer. But in Mumbai I also learned what money cannot see inside that cricketer. Nobody at an auction asks how that batsman batted in the fifth-day sun in last season's Ranji final.

Today, watching Indian domestic cricket from Liverpool, I see something strange. The Indian team has one of the best fast-bowling stocks in the world — names like Bumrah, Siraj, Shami who win matches on foreign pitches. But how many of these players came through long Ranji seasons? Most of their route to the Test team runs through the IPL. Ranji was a staircase for them, not the destination.

And this is where another thought joins. The real crisis of Ranji is not of statistics but of "season." A tournament lives only when it has a season — a time people anticipate. The day people see Ranji as a tournament that "stops in the middle," it becomes an administrative obligation.

When I played for Lancashire's second XI in 2026, our coach once said, "You have only one thing — your time." I heard it as a line about sport. Later I understood it is also true of tournaments — time, the continuity in which a player bakes and coverage grows.

Now look forward. The 2026 Women's World Cup at home is a big opportunity for India — and it is not only a question of that victory. It is a question of whether the WPL's broadcast promises will be kept. The energy that has come into women's cricket will convert into the next generation of players only if the broadcast truly reaches the game that happens off the field — from the training ground, from the hostel, from state association meetings. That is my next notebook page.

I still remember, in 2026, when I worked on the launch of the TRDW (Talent Resource Development Wing) as a consultant for the Karnataka State Cricket Association, our first question was: how will a boy bowling on a village pitch get on television? At that time we built a network of trials in small towns, and from that network emerged names like Dhoni, Raina, Irfan Pathan, R.P. Singh. The BCCI replicated that model nationwide in 2026. The lesson from that time is the same today: talent is everywhere, but the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it are few.

I am 64 now. One bag, a two-hundred-page notebook, and one ticket — that is my whole journalism. I do not sit in a studio. I go where the game is — whether it is the sandy ground at Bhuj or the county ground at Liverpool.

My notebook opens where the bowler's rhythm breaks, and there I always see one thing — the moment on a player's face when he realises the tournament is no longer his. That moment is the real picture of Ranji's current phase.

The question is not whether Ranji will survive. The question is whether the board can save it with a season in which it can truly live. That is what is going to be written on the next page of my notebook.