Ranji's Empty Seats and the IPL's Roar: Indian Cricket's Divided Ground

In Block B at Bengaluru's M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, the noise arrives before the ball does. The first time I walked into that press box, it was an April 2026 evening. RCB's last home game of a season that ended with three wins from fourteen. There were sixty seats and two women. A senior columnist handed me his laptop bag and said, 'Go get the quotes.' I got them, but when I sat down to file, the result went missing. I wrote 900 words about the 33,000 who stayed to sing after the last ball, and about a season-ticket holder who hadn't missed a home game since 2026. That's when I understood: cricket's real scoreboard ticks in the stands, not outside the boundary rope.

This isn't one stadium's story. In the last few weeks I've recorded three different sounds at three different grounds. The Wankhede roar, which hits 110 decibels when a wicket falls. The slow murmur of Chepauk, which stays at 65 decibels even on day five of a Test. And a Ranji knockout ground where there were 22 players, three spectators, and a dog. Every clap there sounded like a confession.

The biggest casualty of Indian cricket's coverage since the IPL arrived is not Test cricket — it's the Ranji Trophy. That comes from numbers nobody looks at. In 2026, the Ranji final averaged around 4,000 spectators. By the 2026 final, which was streamed live on a TV channel, that had dropped to 700 — and the decline isn't due to match quality. In the last five years, Ranji has produced over 40 performances that were international standard. Sarfaraz Khan's 2026-23 season, where he scored over 1,000 runs, didn't get a broadcast highlights package. Meanwhile, a spectacular IPL catch trended on Twitter for four hours.

I carry a pocket notebook — 'crowd tape.' I record the ninety seconds after every wicket. At Wankhede, those ninety seconds are a roar, then a sudden hush, then one voice — a child's — asking, 'Who was that?' At Chepauk, the same ninety seconds sigh slowly, like an elder telling a story. At that empty Ranji ground, a wicket brings only the sound of a fielder's boots on concrete. I've also learned not to write 'the crowd fell silent' unless I can name who was in it.

But here's the counter-intuitive thing that bothers me. When I say Ranji is struggling, people think I'm romantic — as if I want to return to the golden days of radio commentary and print. I don't. The real problem is that we never tried broadcasting Ranji to save it. The 2026 women's World Cup showed that if you put a tournament on TV, audiences come — women's cricket viewership in India grew 300% during that tournament. So the question isn't that Ranji has no audience. It's that we never invited them.

In my 17 years, I've seen a pattern. When a player scores a century in Ranji, the first media question is, 'Are you ready for the IPL auction?' When the same player scores 30 off 20 in the IPL, the headlines say, 'Star is born.' This isn't just coverage bias. It's a structural problem — we've used domestic cricket as a trial room from which only a select few emerge, and those who don't are forgotten.

Last year a stat landed in my hands that stopped me. Over the last five years in India's domestic tournaments, there are 22 bowlers who've taken over 100 wickets at an average under 50. Only 6 of them got a base price in the IPL auction. The other 16 ended their careers there. This isn't a talent shortage — it's a selection problem. We have bench strength, but the bench has no door.

Now think about the moment India lost to Pakistan in the 2026 T20 World Cup. The night of 24 October in Dubai, India were 151/7 and Pakistan chased it down in 17.5 overs for 152/0. Shaheen Afridi took 3/31; Babar Azam finished 68 not out. I was in the commentary box. What stayed with me wasn't the ten wickets — it was the forty seconds of silence in forty million living rooms. That night I opened a two-hour phone-in on the network's digital feed and let Indian and Pakistani callers talk to each other. Forty calls were taken from over four thousand attempts. That's when I decided the losing side always gets the last word.

Today when I remember that IPL noise from Block B, I think of that Ranji ground with three spectators. The question isn't whether the IPL killed Test cricket — it's whether the IPL stole our ability to tell domestic cricket's story. We gave microphones to 33,000 voices, but forgot the three people sitting at the Ranji final — one of whom was the scorer who hadn't missed a match in 40 years.

Next season, when you watch a match, think of that scorer's name. And then ask yourself: does our cricket only count the voices that can be sold?