The Ranji Scorecard Is the Last Place to Look for the Truth: A Report from the Training Ground

At 7 a.m. on the outside nets at the MCA Stadium in Pune there are four people: a curator, an assistant coach, and two net bowlers. Fifteen years ago there were also four. The only difference is that two of them now hold phones, and they are checking a score from somewhere else. That scene gave me the most important cricket question of this week, and the question is not in the scorecard.

I have stood at that net for twenty-eight years. In 2026, when I spent a full season with the Maharashtra Ranji squad, Kedar Jadhav was twenty-two and scored 865 runs at 54.00. My first draft was about how big that record was. The editor cut it and asked, 'What does he do after four o'clock?' For three weeks I watched that. Jadhav batted alone for forty minutes after nets, no bowler, just counting footwork. The truth of that season was the 865; the cause of the 865 was those forty minutes.

This is my whole method, and it is also the great blindness of the moment. In a tournament cycle all attention goes to the scoreboard, the strike rate, the run rate — while a team's real condition is decided on the nets, in the corner of the dressing room, and in the presence of the seventh bowler. Injury, workload and morale never appear in a scorecard.

Earlier this year I watched a Ranji match where one side made 480 in the first innings. The next day's paper ran a headline about batting. I was at that ground on day three. That team's seamers had bowled 140 overs all season; their spinners had bowled 390. The scorecard does not show that the quick bowlers had no rhythm and that the coach was changing the ice-bath temperature every evening. The team won, then lost three matches — because the real crisis of that season was never the score, it was the length of spells.

I am not saying numbers lie. Numbers are correct and incomplete at the same time. In 2026, when the IPL team arrived in Pune, I travelled all fourteen matches and wrote a diary note every evening. After a last-ball defeat, I spoke to twelve fans in the stands. Nine of them complained not about the result but about ticket prices. The match report said defeat; the truth of that evening was that the audience had already changed its expectation.

Then 2026. The spot-fixing story broke and Sreesanth was arrested. I stood outside the team hotel and stadium for three days and spoke to twenty fans. None of them was talking about a score. A fixed match looks entirely normal on a scorecard; to see it you need to know the tempo it was played at. In that piece I did not count overs. I wrote the faces of those twenty people. It remains my most read piece, and it contains not one technical term.

Here is where my colleagues disagree with me. They say I ignore bowling data. The truth is I am wary of data, because in twenty-five years I have watched a spreadsheet win any argument, whether or not the argument was right. My objection is not to data but to its misuse — when thirty overs in one season decide a bowler's future.

That same thinking took me to the UAE for four months with the Mumbai side in 2026. Empty stadiums. Two hundred on the board and silence in the stands. I profiled a fifty-member Zoom watch party in Pune that screamed together every match. I wrote no player statistics in that piece. I wrote that the online fan was alone at the same time the player was alone, and that both kinds of loneliness were the same, only one was paid crores and the other was laid off.

Back to that morning. Four people, two phones. I asked whose score they were watching. The answer: 'The big match.' That is the real story, and it will not be written in any scorecard. The IPL did not hollow out Test cricket in this country; it hollowed out the floor beneath it — and that floor is Ranji, Vijay Hazare, the net where four people stand this morning. In a tournament cycle that count falls faster, because every phone, every camera and every editor is looking up.

This is my counter-intuitive read and I am testing it against the record, not sentiment. Ranji match-days have shrunk, the press box holds three people, and a generation of regional-language commentators is retiring one by one. All three are countable without advanced metrics, only by showing up. Tournament fever tells us the biggest moment is coming; I ask where the seventh bowler who will make that moment is standing.

I have watched a thousand drills end. The ones that matter end quietly, without camera, applause or scoreboard. After this tournament, somewhere on an outside net, one boy will be counting footwork alone, and nobody will be watching. The question is whether next time someone makes 865, anyone will remember the cause — or whether we will read the number and think we understood the story.