Nobody Writes the Ranji Obituary: Stop Blaming the IPL

On the evening of 17 February 2026, in a hotel ballroom in Mumbai, I watched Andrew Symonds' name sell for 1.35 million dollars. A Deepika Padukone film poster hung outside and the Deccan Chargers table sat inside. Within four months that team won two of fourteen matches. I wrote then that the squad was fine and the captaincy was the leak. Twelve months later Adam Gilchrist lifted the trophy in Johannesburg. Since that day I have had one question: why do we treat the IPL as the accused in every case?

On television over the past few weeks I have heard one sentence on repeat. The IPL killed Test cricket. The IPL killed Ranji. The IPL broke the spine of red-ball cricket. The sentence sounds brave. The man saying it believes he has uttered a bitter truth. But the sentence is lazy. It is like a man who calls a fever a mosquito and never tests for malaria.

The numbers point the other way. The IPL began in 2026. Since then India has not reduced the number of Test matches but increased them, in 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026. Test matches were not squeezed out of the domestic season; the BCCI created a separate window for Tests in the fixtures calendar. If the IPL were killing Test cricket, the first days to be cut would be those of domestic Test series. They were not cut.

What was cut is the Ranji Trophy. And that cut began before the IPL.

The decline graph of Ranji begins not in 2026 but in the early 2000s. That is when the board began moving domestic matches out of stadiums and onto empty grounds because tickets were not selling. Coverage shrank. Ranji vanished from television. In the 1990s I counted three hundred spectators at a Ranji match at the Gymkhana ground in Hyderabad. Half of them had come because a relative's son was playing. Ranji's first cause of death was that it stopped making spectators, not players. The IPL merely set fire to a room in which Ranji's body was already lying.

What the IPL took from Ranji was not calendar space but aspiration. Once a twenty-year-old boy dreamed he would score a hundred in Ranji and then play for India. Today the same boy dreams he will be bought at the IPL auction. That shift is fatal not to Test cricket but to Ranji, because Ranji's entire justification was that it is the gateway to Tests. When nobody looks at the gateway, you do not need to close the door; it comes off its hinges on its own.

I have evidence for this. Among the batsmen who have scored at a strike rate above three hundred in Ranji over the past five years, most have already been bought in the IPL, and the ones who bat four hundred balls for three hundred runs are asked after by nobody. This is not bad batting. It is rational economics. A boy knows his financial life will be decided in twelve balls, so why should he face four hundred? Nobody plays the long innings in Ranji any more because the long innings has no buyer. And what has no buyer eventually has no producer.

Here I must turn my own argument over. I said above that blaming the IPL is wrong. But the other side is this: the IPL did not kill Ranji; it built a parallel structure outside the domestic framework with the money that was always there. The BCCI never put into Ranji the money it put into the IPL. That was cricket's choice, and the board made it, not the IPL.

Now the part where I could be wrong. Perhaps I am looking at the past softly. Ranji of the eighties and nineties was no paradise. It had regional politics, four-day grinds on difficult surfaces, and great players who went hungry despite playing it. Perhaps the IPL has dimmed one dark corner of that world. The poor boy who earned nothing in Ranji becomes a crorepati overnight at an IPL auction. That is a distributional improvement and I am not counting it. If I acknowledge only the IPL's economic revolution and deny Ranji's cultural death, I join the same journalists who pick statistics to suit themselves.

But my point is not that the IPL is good or bad. My point is that we are writing the obituary of the wrong body. The IPL did not kill Test cricket. Test cricket still draws India's largest crowds when England or Australia tour. What has died is the Ranji Trophy, and its killer is not the IPL but a system that never made Ranji a stage. It used it only as a sieve. A sieve does not need to be a stage, and a sieve never asks for an obituary.

If Ranji is to be saved it must return to television. Hyderabad versus Saurashtra should start at eight at night. There should be commentary. Tickets should sell. The Ranji final should be played where spectators can come, not on empty grounds. And most of all, the batsman who faces seven hundred balls in Ranji should get a premium at the IPL auction. If the board starts paying for long innings in Ranji, watch how quickly boys learn patience.

And if that does not happen, the next decade will be spent complaining that the Test team has no batsman who can bat six hours. We will blame the IPL then. But the fault will lie with the cupboard in that room whose key we lost thirty years ago.