Witness to the Third Morning: How Ranji Found Its Voice Among Thirty at Kotla

On the third morning of November 2026, Feroz Shah Kotla had 41,000 seats and a count of thirty-one. I was twenty-three, covering Delhi versus Railways for a digital desk. A steward walked up and asked if I was the scorer. I said no, a reporter, and he smiled and walked away. Then I did what I should have done: I didn't count the empty blue seats — I listened to the players' voices. "Here, here" — the wicketkeeper's call carrying all the way to the empty third-tier balcony. When a cricket match loses its audience, its voice becomes strangely clear. That was my first fine detail: emptiness is not noise; emptiness is a filter.

That morning, a twenty-one-year-old Rishabh Pant took the innings from 54/4. Ninety-one off 78 balls — and let me be clear here, this was not a "match-winning" innings. The match ended in a draw, Railways surviving fourteen overs. But what I remember from that innings, to this day, is not the strike rate but Pant changing his approach in the sixth or seventh over — leaving the same bowler's line twice, then driving straight on the third ball for a boundary. This was not a matter of technique; it was a matter of patience. The batsman told the bowler he had read him. In that one over the direction of the match did not change, but its mood did. And that mood carried Pant to the Test door — to the 2026 England tour, to the Gabba innings of 2026.

The Ranji Trophy stands in an odd place today. It is the tournament that gave us everyone from Sunil Gavaskar to Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid to Virat Kohli, and Ajinkya Rahane to Rishabh Pant. But its coverage has shrunk to the knockout stage. In the regular season the press box sits empty, and the journalists who remain are often regional-language stringers — whose names do not appear in the reports but whose notebooks record the real history of the match. This is not a complaint. It is a structural fact: the tournament that built the national team sees its media infrastructure dry up first.

I am not making the "journalists these days don't do the work" argument. Because that isn't true. What is true is that in 2026, when I sat at Kotla, the press box was already thinly populated. The difference is that even then no one was stopping me — I was covering for a digital desk that wanted only the scorecard from Ranji. Most of my 800 words went to the scorecard and that one Pant innings. When I told my editor about the steward, he said, "Good, but keep the scorecard on top." That wasn't wrong. But it was incomplete. Ranji's problem is not that it is unpopular — the problem is that it is not popular in a way that can be measured in digital audience numbers.

That 2026 match taught me two things. First, Ranji does not have speeches or stump mics — the players speak in their own voices. On the third morning, in the empty stands, a Railways bowler told his captain, "This next over is mine, I'll handle it." That confidence was real, because there was no camera or microphone amplifying it. Second, the scorecard is not everything in Ranji. The most important part of the match was the fourteen overs Railways batted out — 420 minutes, and it made no headline. But those fourteen overs explain why Ranji matters: nobody gives up easily there.

The Structure: Attention on the Knockouts, Not the Regular Season

To understand this, you need to know how the Indian domestic system works. The Ranji Trophy has 38 teams, four Elite groups (A, B, C, D) and a Plate group. This is the format since 2026-18, when it was restructured — before that Elite groups were A, B and C, and Group C carried less prestige, but since 2026 the Plate group was separated and promotion-relegation based on performance was introduced in the Elite groups. But all this happens in the regular season, when there is cricket at some ground every week. And what do you get in the coverage then? The scorecard. Sometimes a 300-word report.

In contrast, the moment the knockout stage arrives, TV cameras appear, feature writers activate, and former cricketers start tweeting. It is a market that pays only for the final week. But Ranji's real story happens in the first week — when a nineteen-year-old takes five wickets in domestic cricket for the first time, or when a thirty-four-year-old batsman realises his career is ending and scores at an average above fifty in his last Ranji season.

In my experience, Ranji coverage's biggest problem is not just quantity but its geographic structure. Teams like Mumbai, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Bengal get steady coverage, because the big-city media houses are there. But when Plate group teams play — Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim — coverage is near zero. This is not just media negligence; it is also an economic fact: sending a press box there is expensive, and the return is low. But the day some boy from Mizoram scored a Ranji century, no newspaper gave it the front page. And that is where cricket's social role weakens — when a team knows its game will not be seen, the motivation to win drops too.

The Pant Case: How One Ranji Innings Opened the Test Door

Now let us return to that Pant innings I watched in 2026. It was not just about the numbers. Ninety-one from 54/4 came in a situation where Delhi were struggling. But the real significance was that the risks Pant took were unusual for Ranji level — he was playing the reverse sweep when most domestic batsmen just want to defend and secure their place. At that time, a saying was famous in Ranji: "Don't take risks in domestic cricket, build your average." Pant broke that rule. And that is why he became Ranji's most talked-about player — he used domestic cricket as a stage for experimentation, not a stage for display.

But it is equally true that Pant's case is the exception, not the rule. Every Ranji season, hundreds of players turn out for 38 teams, and most never make the national side. Their stories end quietly — no stadium farewell, no documentary, no crowd. That is the pain attached to Ranji, and it has no place in coverage. When we cover only the knockouts, we lose the stories of the hundreds of players for whom Ranji is everything — a stage where they know they won't be there next year, but they play anyway.

The Neglect of Bowlers: Ranji's Uncovered Wickets

One more thing I felt at that 2026 Kotla match — Ranji coverage revolves around batsmen. Eight hundred words get written about a 91-run innings, but the bowler who takes four wickets in the same match (look, I don't remember the name, because I didn't write it down that day — that's the problem) gets a mention in one paragraph. Bowling stories in domestic cricket are the most subtle: which bowler bowls how on which ground, whose ball finds seam movement, whose action is changing, whose pace is dropping. All of this is visible only from inside the match. And this is exactly the information the national selection committee needs — but it doesn't get printed in the media, because the media is at the knockout stage.

Personally, this hurts me because when I joined The Times of India in 2026, I learned on the sports desk how to find the story behind the numbers. But even then very little was written about Ranji. My editor at the time would say, "Nobody reads Ranji." I asked, "Have you ever tried?" He didn't answer. That non-answer is the answer. The truth is that Ranji is read — that Pant innings piece of mine got 4,000 reads, which was decent for a digital desk. But that was probably not because of the piece but because something was different at Kotla that day. When you write about something people haven't seen, you have to show it. And the media has stopped showing Ranji.

Outdoors vs Indoors: Why Ranji's Strength Is Its Weakness

Ranji has a characteristic that is often ignored: the tournament is played outdoors — the sound of the stands carries clearly, the wind's effect shows on the ball, and the ground's condition changes each day. This gives an approximation of Test cricket. In that 2026 match, the Kotla pitch was dry, and there was some help for the bowlers on the third morning. I watched a Railways fast bowler land the ball in the same spot for three overs straight — his accuracy was Test standard. But what happened to that bowler after that match? Perhaps nothing. Because Ranji wasn't covered, and selectors didn't see him. This is the cycle that needs breaking: less coverage → less visibility → less selection → less motivation.

The Contrarian View: "Ranji Needs More Coverage" Is Easy to Say, but the Question Is Deeper

Now I will say the thing that is perhaps uncomfortable for my profession. It is easy to say Ranji needs more coverage. Everyone will agree. But the question is: coverage for whom, and in what form? If we cover only the big-city matches, we will repeat the mistake we made in international cricket — where only the big names get space. If we cover only the knockouts, the regular-season struggle remains invisible. And if we write only "inspirational stories," that too is a kind of bias — reducing Ranji players to tales of rising from poverty to success.

I remember that in 2026, watching the World Cup from a Lajpat Nagar cafe (64 matches, 600 words a day), I felt that remote viewing is not lesser reporting — if you can hear the voices of the people in the room. In the same way, Ranji has to be watched from the room where it is played — from Kotla's empty seats, from the mohalla club, from the colony drawing room. Coverage does not mean just match reports — it means showing the places where cricket is actually felt. And that will happen only when we stop treating Ranji as a "small tournament."

And a deeper point: Ranji's coverage crisis is not just a media crisis, it is a crisis of Indian cricket's power structure. When IPL auctions get 24-hour channels and Ranji gets not a single show, it tells you where cricket's economic value is seen. Ranji players get match fees, but no market value builds around them — because the market can't see them. It is a cycle in which media, money and selection reinforce each other. And there is only one way to break it: cover Ranji on its own terms, not on IPL's terms.

A Present-Day Fact That Gives Hope

Here I want to mention something that is not just a story of loss. In the 2026-25 Ranji season, some new things happened. The BCCI started some additional digital streaming of Ranji matches — limited, but a start. Separately, some state associations began live-streaming their home matches on YouTube. This is exactly what I advocate: start showing Ranji, so people can watch it. When India hosted the Women's World Cup in 2026, we saw how domestic women's cricket coverage grew — because the tournament was at home. The same logic applies to Ranji: if we cover domestic cricket in its place, it can find its place.

Takeaway: The Third Morning That Is Still Going On

I still remember that third morning at Kotla when there were thirty people and Pant was batting. I don't know how many of those thirty still watch Ranji today. But I know that what happened on the field that day is not fully recorded in any scorecard — it was in Pant reading the bowler in the sixth over, in that Railways bowler's accuracy, and in the steward's question that mistook me for the scorer. The Ranji Trophy is not anyone's inheritance; it is a living tradition — and living traditions survive only when they are seen.

Today, when I sit in Delhi and look at domestic cricket's numbers, I feel Ranji's biggest win is still to come — a win in which it is heard in its own voice, watched at its own pace, and remembered by its own people. Perhaps the next time there is a Ranji match at Kotla, the steward won't ask someone about the scorer, but will say, "The girl sitting there is a reporter, she wrote about Pant's innings last time." It is a small thing, but cricket's inheritance is built from such small things — and we must not stop recording them.