The Hidden Column in Gavaskar's Ranji Warning: 32 Against 6, and a Calendar Trap

Reading Sunil Gavaskar's column in Mid-Day, I stopped at a line that contained no star name and no match score — only numbers. The Ranji Trophy now runs 32 teams in the Elite division, arranged in four groups of eight. The Plate group holds six. One trophy, one name, yet two competitions of different standard running side by side. Gavaskar's actual complaint sits elsewhere: India A's tour of New Zealand has collided with the Ranji calendar, and the domestic game is paying for it. But across years of sitting with first-class scorecards, what I keep seeing is this — the phrase “a Ranji record” no longer means a single thing. Gavaskar's question lives inside that split. The calendar clash is only its most visible layer. After the Lodha committee's recommendations, every state and union territory was given a place in the Ranji Trophy. The goal was representation — spreading the game into every corner of the country. The result: more teams, then a division of those teams into two tiers by standard. On top, the Elite: 32 teams, four groups of eight. Below, the Plate: six teams. The Plate final winner is promoted to the Elite the following season. On paper the system sounds clean — compete, then earn promotion. The problem is that the gap between the two tiers is so wide that promoted sides get exposed the moment they arrive in the Elite. Gavaskar himself writes that teams that dominate the Plate are found wanting once promoted. That gap is the real story, not just the India A tour. Promotion and relegation exist on paper, but they do not close the distance in the short term. A Plate champion rises, and within its first Elite season everyone can see how far behind it is. Confidence takes the hit, and record comparison gets messier still. A second layer sits on top. The India A tour and the Ranji Trophy are both controlled by the board. In the same window, two events are claiming the same players. This is not an external constraint; it is an internal coordination failure. The Future Tours Programme and the domestic calendar are compressed enough that the overlap is close to unavoidable. One point needs stating clearly: Gavaskar is not against the A tour. He concedes that A matches help show who is more likely to succeed internationally. He objects only to the calendar overlap. The debate is not development versus no development; it is calendar governance. A record hanging on the trophy wall never carries a small note beside it — at which tier, against which bowling attack, it was made. Gavaskar's observation is that 2,000 runs or 100 wickets in a single season is now possible. The number sounds hard, but when the opposition is split across two tiers, the number no longer carries identical weight. 2,000 runs in an Elite group and 2,000 runs in the Plate group placed in one column and called “the Ranji top run-scorer” is bad arithmetic. A record's meaning is built relative to the strength of its opposition; when the opposition comes in two kinds, the record does too. Here is the second trap. Good players who cannot break into their home state sides are going to Plate teams to play. So a Plate side can look weak on paper yet be strong in individual quality; an Elite side can look big by name yet be thin in real strength. That reverse current muddies record comparison further. When two competitions run under one name, the selector's job does not get easier — it gets harder. The third problem runs deeper. International cricketers barely play the Ranji Trophy at all. So the benchmark against which domestic performance should be calibrated is absent from the field. Without a benchmark, a record is only a number. Gavaskar's claim is that Ranji's leading performers struggle to find their feet at international level. That is an observation, not a measured correlation — there is no defined sample, timeframe, or base rate behind it. A comparison with our own country is useful here. The National Cricket League has lived with the same problem for years — internationals play little, so measuring international readiness directly from league performance is hard. When a board schedules the league and a Bangladesh A tour in the same window, the same coordination problem returns. India's case is therefore not an exception; it is a recurring design — where the pathway (A tours) and the base (domestic league) compete for the same players and the same calendar slots, and the base usually loses. One number is worth holding on to: India A is playing three unofficial Tests in New Zealand. New Zealand conditions — seam, swing, green tops — are a hard examination for young Indian batters. That examination is never available on Ranji's home wickets. From a development standpoint, the A tour is therefore a higher-grade filter than the Ranji Trophy. Gavaskar concedes that too. The problem is that the filter is being run at the base's expense. I am used to reading numbers off spreadsheet columns. There the number is never false; only the column is hidden. For the Ranji Trophy, the hidden column is the tier split — 32 against 6. One trophy name, two competitions inside. A selector who reads only “2,000 runs in Ranji” is not reading the column. This is where Gavaskar's argument has a soft spot, and it is written in his own column. He says at once that Elite-division competition has levelled — that former weak teams now win the title — and calls it “most encouraging.” Then he says the standard has dropped. Both statements can be true together, but media framing usually grabs one — “the decline of domestic cricket.” Reality is two-sided: competition has risen, depth has fallen. The second weakness: “weak Ranji leads to international failure” is a plausible relationship, not a proven cause. Failure to find one's feet internationally could be equally driven by the jump in standard between domestic and international cricket, insufficient A tours, or inconsistent selection. A rigorous version would need a conversion-rate study — what Ranji's top run-scorers actually return internationally. That data is not in the column. A third point: Gavaskar is a defender of the traditional, pre-expansion Ranji order. The representation gain brought by post-Lodha inclusion carries no weight in his framing. This is not neutral analysis; it is a position — the representation-versus-excellence debate, and he leans toward excellence. The most important point is this: the Ranji Trophy is being eroded from two directions — an expanded, tier-split structure, and a calendar collision with the India A tour. Of the two, the one that is easy to fix is not the structure — it is the calendar. Deconflicting the calendar is a low-cost, high-value fix. Yet the board has historically been reactive, not proactive. Changing the structure is politically hard — excluding states and union territories means touching the representation question. Changing the calendar is comparatively simple. The question is whether the simple job will be done. The effect of a degraded selection signal is not immediate but delayed. One season of wrong selection means a jolt at international level two or three years later. And when that jolt arrives, nobody remembers the tier split. A weaker domestic product carries a quiet commercial cost too — lower broadcast interest, thinner sponsorship. The column contains no financial figures, so this is inference, not proof. One angle is missing from the column as well: shuttling players between A tours and domestic matches in a compressed calendar raises workload risk. That data is absent too. How the next season's Future Tours Programme and domestic calendar are arranged will show whether the board treats the Ranji Trophy as a foundation, or as an obstacle sitting beside the pathway. And if promoted Plate sides keep getting outclassed in the Elite, the question will not stay confined to Gavaskar's column. A simple question will stand in front of the selectors: on a record built across two tiers, which player do you send into international cricket?