The Empty Ranji Ground and the Sound the Scorecard Never Records

The gate at Gymkhana Ground was padlocked, but from inside came the sound of a bat. It was nine in the morning in Hyderabad, and there was no one in the press box but me. Thirty years earlier, when I first came here, it was the same hour, and the only difference was that then there were thirty men, the smell of ink and aftershave, and I was the only woman. Now I am alone. That is all. On the field, a sixteen-year-old was leaving six balls in a row. No coach, no camera, no commentator. Only the smell of linseed oil and a boy's breathing. I opened my notebook and wrote: "The decision to leave is also a form of batting." That day I remembered when the Ranji Trophy had actually died — not the death of Test cricket, but the death of the Ranji week.

In this phase of the regular season, whenever anyone asks me what Indian cricket's greatest loss is, I never say "the declining crowds at Test cricket." I say: the Monday morning when a Ranji match began and schoolchildren stood at the gate with their fathers. That morning no longer exists. Franchise cricket did not kill the Test match — it killed the week in which domestic cricket used to be the people's cricket. Before the first IPL season, a Ranji match ran four days, and on the fourth evening the stands held people who knew a player's story, not just his face. Now those same stands are empty, and in that emptiness lies something built not merely by nostalgia but by a television deal, a board resolution and a scheduling decision.

What I have seen at domestic grounds over the last three seasons is a pattern no scorecard shows. Most Ranji matches are now played at neutral venues, because the board's priority is that matches be "production-ready" — grounds with broadcast crews, rooms, floodlights. The result is that the people of a player's own city never see him with their own eyes. In 2026, when Ambati Rayudu played his first-class debut at Gymkhana, I wrote 400 words and the desk cut them to 120 — because they felt the smell and the left ball was not "cricket." I kept the original. Today, when I sit down to write that story, I find the reader also demands what the desk demanded that day: score, average, strike rate. But the question is: is that the reader's demand, or the ecosystem's — the one that taught the reader cricket is only numbers?

One fact must be placed here, because without an institutional fact this becomes mere lament. The Ranji Trophy's broadcast rights have never been a primary revenue line for the board — domestic cricket's budget comes mainly from central contracts and international rights. Whether a domestic match is broadcast is therefore economically almost neutral for the board. But it is not neutral for the player. A player whose match is not seen has no sponsorship; without sponsorship, no selection pressure; without selection pressure, no story. And without a story, that player slowly becomes a line item in the system's eyes. I have seen bowlers with 200 wickets in five seasons whose names never appeared on an IPL auction list. No one stole their names — no one ever looked at them.

Now look at the other side, which happens before us every February. The auction ballroom. In 2026, when I first sat in that ballroom, I was one of two women. Andrew Symonds went for $1.35 million, Adam Gilchrist for $700,000, and VVS Laxman — the local face of that franchise — had his fee pegged 15 percent above the top bid. One man's worth set by another man's price. That night I wrote two reports: one about numbers, one about what an auction does to a hometown hero's idea of himself. The second one ran. That day I understood that an auction is not a valuation mechanism but a brand competition — and the highest bidder is not always the most essential player. This remains as true today as in 2026. The difference is that we now package it as "excitement."

In 2026 I spent six weeks in South Africa with that same franchise. The previous season they were last — two wins from fourteen. That year they won the final at the Wanderers in Johannesburg. I wrote 3,000 words in three days, almost none of it about the trophy. It was about a dressing room learning to like itself. Since then I abandoned the single-match column — I began writing the season as a novel, with recurring characters and emotional weather. But in that same period another thing happened that I never forgot. In 2026, five days after Delhi Police arrested three players, I went to the Feroz Shah Kotla for the Eliminator — the franchise at the centre of the allegations was still playing. A player's roommate gave me a name. I never wrote it. What I filed that night was about the wives in the stands and the silence in the media tribune. That day I made a rule I have kept since: a source who trusts you must never become something you spend.

Within all this is an aspect almost never raised in the domestic cricket debate: the structural place of gender. When I was the only woman in the Gymkhana press box in 2026, my presence was seen as an "experiment." I thought thirty years later the numbers would change. They did not — not just in the press box, but in domestic cricket coverage. Women's cricket remains a "chance" for most media, not a "beat." Winning the 2026 World Cup was historic, and I do not underrate it — but what changed and what did not after that win proves we still view outcome separately from process. Women's contracts, WPL broadcast promises, selection transparency — these are the same problem as the Ranji week, in different clothes. A game with no audience has no history; and a game with no history gives its players no worth.

Here comes the point I am often disagreed with, and I want to state it plainly because it is the spine of this argument. The common belief is that franchise cricket "saved" domestic cricket — money came, stadiums filled, young players got a stage. I believe this belief has a fundamental error: franchise cricket gave domestic cricket money, but took away its public life. Money and audience are two different things. The man who sat at a Ranji ground did not buy a ticket — he was there because he was part of that city and that player was his neighbour. No TV deal built that bond, and no TV deal can bring it back. The IPL gave audiences a new loyalty — to a franchise, to a brand, to fantasy — but it replaced the old loyalty between ground and identity without any formal mourning.

I am accused of seeing the old era as golden. I do not dismiss this because there is some truth in it — but that truth must be stated fully, or it becomes a lie. That era was not golden. In that era I was the only woman in the press box, and I had to submit my report to a desk where no one asked what I had seen at the ground. In that era a domestic player's income was barely above a teacher's, and he paid for his own surgery. In that era women's cricket coverage was a paragraph on page nineteen, if it ran at all. So when I mourn the empty Ranji stands, I am not mourning the old order — I am mourning that public relationship which existed even inside that order, among those the order kept out. The distinction matters. Between criticising the old system and remembering it there is a third path — and my writing tries to walk it.

Now the side least seen. When we talk about domestic cricket, we almost always talk about players who go "up" — Ranji to Test, sold in the IPL. But the system's real face is the one who does not go up. The 23-24-year-old fast bowler with 140 wickets in three seasons, pace above 135, never called for a single franchise trial. The left-handed batsman averaging 45 over five seasons whose name never entered a selection debate. I have spoken to these players — in small rooms, hotel lobbies, tea stalls outside grounds. None says he was cheated. They say, "Look, I'm playing well, the chance will come." That is the saddest sentence you can hear from a cricketer, because it is not hope — it is a habit the system gave them for thinking about themselves. And when I hear them, I remember I once said the same sentence to myself: I'm writing well, the chance will come.

One thing must be clear, or this becomes a complaint: the problem is not that the IPL exists. The problem is that we have turned our domestic tournament into a "feeder" system whose sole purpose is to produce players for the IPL. A tournament that matters only for who exits it is a tournament that is never won in itself. The Ranji Trophy had its own history, its own stories, its own heroes who never played international cricket but whose names defined their cities. We have shrunk that history by calling it "the first step of a career." The same logic applies to women's cricket — a woman player is still often presented as a "success story" rather than as a complete story in herself. The 2026 World Cup shook that image but did not break it. Note the difference: defining a player by her result and defining a player by her craft — the gap between these two is the system's greatest error.

As for the press, I must say something harsh about my own profession, because the 2000s were my decade of witness. When match-fixing arrived, Indian cricket journalism learned one lesson it never repeated — that journalism's job is not to serve the board but to keep a record against it. In that era we learned that covering the game is not enough; you must cover the power structure that runs it. Today, when I see how rights deals are reported — written off board statements, confirmed by board sources, the whole tour dependent on a board credential — I ask a question every cricket journalist should ask himself: are you covering the BCCI or working for it? I am not accusing anyone; this is the question I ask myself every Monday morning, because the answer never arrives at once.

An objection will arise, and it is fair: this is all very sentimental, but cricket is now a business, and business does not need sentiment. This objection is not entirely wrong — I have heard it for twenty-five years and never fully dismissed it. But I add something often missed: business also needs an audience, and audiences are never built on product alone. They need a story, a city, a face they can call their own. The IPL understood this — it turned cities into brands, hometowns into trademarks. Ranji already had that; no one built it, no one took it — no one paid to broadcast it. And here the line between sport and industry vanishes: where industry will not show the cost, it gets no capital; and where sport gets no capital, it dies slowly in its small real scales — without any announcement.

I will not say it can be made again as it was in 2026. It will not, and perhaps should not — because then a woman was alone, a bowler's surgery came from his own pocket, and page nineteen carried one paragraph. What I say is that we must begin to see domestic cricket as a "public institution" rather than a "feeder" — one whose own audience is good, whose history is not for sale, and whose player does not play only so he can be sold at an auction. Until we pass the empty Ranji stands by calling it merely "change," we will not ask where the man who sat there went. And we must ask that about women's cricket's empty stands too, because there the lack of audience was never called "market demand" — it was called "lack of interest" and closed.

I still keep that old notebook. On one page is the spiked 2026 lede: "The ball was going wide, and the boy left it." Below it I later wrote a date and left the page blank. That blank page still has something to be written on it, and I think that is the real cricket writing of this decade — the space where we write, beyond the scorecard, the thing that was in the sound of inner rooms, and which was never heard in any ballroom. What the scorecard records, the terrace does not remember. And that is our work: to remember the terrace.