The Empty Ranji Press Box: The IPL Didn't Kill Test Cricket, It Hollowed Out the Domestic Scorecard Desk

At Wankhede that afternoon, what caught my eye wasn't on the scoreboard. Day two of a Ranji Trophy knockout: twenty players on the field, a shed full of coaches and support staff — and in the press box, three of us. One old man like me who sent his first byline from Chandigarh in 2026; one young local reporter doing video alongside; and a scorer whose copybook has been filled the same way for forty years. Fifteen years ago, on the same day of the same match, nineteen of us sat in that box. I remember because rain delayed the start and we ordered three rounds of chai between us.

This is not a complaint. It is a measurement.

Over the past few months I opened my old diaries — Ranji notes from 2026 to 2026. A pattern emerged that surprised even me. All of us in the press assume the franchise calendar damaged Test cricket. Fitness, format, scheduling — the argument always sticks there. But when I turned the pages, the first thing to disappear wasn't the Test match. It was the chronicler of the first-class game. Ranji Trophy knockout coverage, which used to be a permanent beat at every big paper, shrank first, and shrank fastest.

I'm not offering an argument here, I'm laying out a timeline. Because when you lay twenty years of clippings side by side, you find what a single day's reporting can never show.

How the Ranji knockout desk emptied out

First, understand what the Ranji structure used to be. In the eighties and nineties, the Ranji Trophy wasn't just a tournament; it was a press ecosystem. Five zones, each with a resident reporter; a scorecard clerk in every major city who filed on the teleprinter each evening. When I started in Chandigarh in 2026, the first six months were mostly written around the militancy years in Punjab — but cricket became my chosen beat, and within it, the domestic circuit. Back then, if a Ranji quarter-final was in some city, a paper sent a reporter. Nobody thought that expenditure wasted. Why? Because the news of India selection came from there. A zonal selector's decision, a Ranji innings, a spell — that was the actual selection process, and the press was its witness.

Then 2026 arrived. And here I have to be clear, because I've seen it from both sides. The IPL did not kill Test cricket. Test cricket still sells in India — the day-four Ahmedabad match, the pink-ball fixture in Kolkata, these fill box offices. What died was the Ranji coverage budget. And it took me time to see that this death didn't come from bad news but good news. When franchise cricket arrived, every paper had a new, shinier beat to spend on — the auction, trading, camps in the West Indies. The same money and the same reporter went there. The Ranji knockout, once a "go see the future player" beat, became a "go see again the player you already know" beat — because the future player is already in the IPL's sights.

Here is a fact I pulled from my diary. In the 2026-08 Ranji season, my Mumbai office sent reporters to three different cities for the knockout phase. In 2026-19, the same paper ran the entire knockout on one stringer and a wire copy. This number isn't from a survey; it's the ink in my own notebook — so read it as a bureaucratic shift, not a national survey. But the direction is clear. And I think this is the real damage: the players didn't vanish; the witnesses did. The Ranji batsman who scored five hundred runs in the nineties has his story in a reporter's diary. The one who does it today has his story in a scorecard on the Board's website — and a scorecard never tells you why that batsman changed his grip in the nets that first morning.

This is the heart of my point. Cricket history is built from three things — the scorecard, the statistic, and the note of someone who was actually there. The third is fading, and nobody is replacing it.

The auction room is the real selection committee

Now let's walk to the room where selection happens today.

January 2026, the IPL mega auction in Bengaluru. This was the auction where Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals returned after two-season bans, and where Ben Stokes went for ₹12.5 crore. The whole hall was fixed on that bid ladder. I didn't write a word about it for two days.

I spent those two days on something else: a twenty-six-year-old Mumbai left-hander with forty-one first-class matches, unsold in round one and bought in the accelerated round. His name wasn't in any headline that day. His base price was set below even his best season. I sat with his father in the hotel lobby until midnight, and his agent — struck that a national reporter had spent two days on his client instead of headline bids — promised me first call on every move that season.

That promise was kept. That season I learned every team meeting that player did or didn't get before the agent did. And for the next seven seasons I wrote a column that never appeared on a scoreboard: "Who actually lost the auction." Franchise analysts read it before every window, because it held what the TV graphics didn't — base prices, unsold lists, and the agent's call about which player would be entered in which round next time.

I want to be clear here, because my entire career rests on long relationships with Board officials and franchise staff, and those very relationships gave me my best corridor material. I am not a Board employee, although the coverage should say who signs the cheque. The auction room has now replaced the zonal selector, and if a reporter reads it only as a price list, he'll miss the room's most essential part — the paddle rising and holding.

What I learned in those two days: In the auction room, every paddle is a pulse I learned to count. When three teams bid on a player in succession, that doesn't tell you the player's value — it tells you which team is doubting its own scouting report. And when a team goes quiet after the first bid, it's usually not a shortage of money but uncertainty about its slot for that player. This nuance never makes TV, because TV shows the price, not the pulse.

But here's a trap I've avoided many times myself, and the reader should avoid it too. When you count paddles for two days, you start seeing fate in the bid ladder — "this player stopped at ₹4.2 crore, so that team didn't want him." That's wrong. Check every bid against the player's actual role and record, or you'll mistake price for providence. Report the arithmetic, not the omen.

Another thing vanished from the Ranji ground — and it wasn't the fast bowler

Back to the Ranji ground.

I remember a 2026 match in Rajkot. December cold, the first spell of the morning, and I sat by the boundary with a local coach who had come to that ground for thirty years. He showed me something no scorecard holds: in the first hour of the first morning, the wind direction at that ground shifts, and the fast bowler who knows it takes two wickets in his first three overs. That knowledge isn't in any book. It's in that man's notebook, and in my page from that day.

Today when I see coverage of a Ranji match, I find: a score, a two-line match report, and a photo. That wind-direction anecdote isn't there, because the man who would write it is gone. And this, in my eyes, is the real damage of the franchise calendar. The thinning of Ranji coverage is the gap no dashboard shows. You can find every tournament's final score online; you can't find which coach called which boy to the nets at ten at night behind that score.

This isn't my personal grievance; it's a matter of record. And completing the record is my habit — I write for people who will need this in ten years, not for people who want to win an argument tonight.

Don't mistake old memory for evidence

Here I have to restrain myself, because this is the article's most dangerous turn.

I have memories of radio commentary — the days we sat for hours waiting for commentary and the rain report itself got printed on the scorecard. I have memories of those Doordarshan evenings when a single camera covered an entire match. I cannot make these memories the foundation of any argument. They are a measure of change, not evidence for a debate. And I promise you this: wherever this article says "it used to be like this," a current number or document will follow. Otherwise, read me as just an old man searching for his past.

But despite that restraint, one thing genuinely worries me. And that is the coverage future of women's cricket.

Why post-2026 women's cricket could repeat the same mistake

After the Women's World Cup, and with WPL money, women's cricket has become India's fastest-growing cricket market. And I won't hesitate to say its coverage is still as under-assigned as Ranji was in 2026. There's money on the table, crowds in the stands, ratings on TV — but no reporter sitting in the corridor.

Here I remember a clear timeline, one of the most instructive nights of my career.

June 2026, The Oval. The Champions Trophy final, India bowled out for 158, losing to Pakistan by 180 runs. I had travelled the entire tournament with the squad — my paper's first full-access beat. The digital desk wanted four hundred words within twenty minutes of every match, and that night I didn't do it. I sat in the hotel corridor until 1 a.m. with a bowling coach and two players. What I understood that night was that the top order had lost trust in its own method — and that was never going to come out in a press conference. I wrote 2,600 words for the morning that same night. That week it was read more than any match report.

From that night I stopped filing the day-of match report and started a "next morning" long-form column built from corridor conversations. I began logging who spoke to whom at training. And I got my paper to accept one thing: not speed, access — the one thing a forty-nine-year-old beat reporter still owns.

Now the same lesson applies to women's cricket. When a woman player says something in the corridor, it's truer than the press-conference quote. And today there's nobody there to hear it. The WPL auction headline will be written, but who will write the story of that seventeen-year-old girl who asked her coach in her first training session how to shorten her run-up? That story won't be written, and ten years later someone will ask where this girl suddenly came from. This repetition is what scares me.

The proximity trap

I know my biggest weakness, so I'm putting it in front of you.

I've been on this circuit for forty years. Some officials now in the Board had fathers who knew me back when I signed their team's scorecard in Chandigarh. Those relationships give me my best corridor material — but the same relationships sometimes put me on the wrong side of power. From the inside, I never see it. So publicly I consider it necessary to write: my relationship must be disclosed, and the Board must remain my subject, not my employer. Money runs world cricket, and coverage should say who signs the cheque.

The second trap that comes with the thrill of being contrarian

And now another danger, which could come from this whole article itself.

My "signature" is catching what everyone misses — a corridor anecdote — and overturning the entire national debate with it. It's fun, and it's my identity. But in the thrill of that reversal, one incident becomes a national trend, and one coach's remark becomes the truth of the whole system.

So I restrain myself. To this day I don't have two sources proving that the decline of Ranji coverage happened at the same rate in every state. My diary's facts are my office's, not the country's. I'll call it "a scene," not "a national trend" — until a third source arrives. And if the next truth is that Ranji coverage isn't dying but being reborn on the internet, I won't be afraid to write that I was wrong. Being bound by evidence is the rule of this whole job.

What signals I'll watch in the next seventeen months

I won't give you a summary. I'll give you the signals I'll write in my notebook over the next seventeen months.

First, how many papers send their permanent reporter to the knockout in the coming Ranji season — and of those, how many write the "IPL preparation" story versus the "this boy's technique has changed" story. Second, watch whether the Board puts match-by-match training reports on its domestic website. If it stays stuck on scorecards, understand that the coverage desk is still empty. And third — which I consider most important — not any WPL team's spot-fixing, but how much of its scouting report becomes public. Because the day those start becoming public, understand that women's cricket's real selection story has found its reporter.

And meanwhile, I'll stay seated in that Wankhede press box — with three people, near a scorer's copybook. The corridor remembers the first beat before the headline finds it. If you want to ask whether the one who catches that first beat will still be around in ten years — that's a good question. I'll meet you with its answer next time, in that same lane, in that same box, with the same chai that's still just as hot.