2012 : Changes to domestic cricket approved

[Crookbond]

Najafgarh Logic as usual by Ganguly. BC ... play country cricket and bat/bowl for 250/600 overs in 6 months. It's a simple game and lets leave it at that.

[Sidhoni]

Oh I didnt read it correctly.I thought if the game ends in a draw at the end of 5th day' date=' the match will go to the extra day and be decided by spinning the coin at the end of the 6th day. [b']If its going to be just the first innings result, it doesnt change anything, as 9 times out of 10, the first innings will surely be completed within the first 5 days even on the most flattest of wickets. The fundamental problem is teams not bothering to go for a result since putting up a 600+ score in the first innings pretty much guarantees them a win. After putting up a huge score, they go for ultra-defensive tactics to make sure the other team cant cross them.

True. It will be finished even if there are 2 days of rain.

[vvvslaxman]

12 overs from pie chuckers on flat pitches.. who would deny that :cantstop:

[Prakat]

[kabira]

well more A tours will be better than longer Ranji season

[Pagalpanti]

^They've done that as well, now we'll have 2 A-tours pre-ranji season every year.

[kabira]

should have more tours definately, 2 is not enough

[vipin]

They should probably have IPL teams play in a test league with 3 foreign players in each team. Just after the Ranji trophy maybe. And every alternate season of this in a foreign country.

[Executioner]

They should probably have IPL teams play in a test league with 3 foreign players in each team. Just after the Ranji trophy maybe. And every alternate season of this in a foreign country.

if their is money everyone will jump in. otherwise they wont give a crap

[Needforspeed]

The move to monitor domestic pitches are also a step in the right direction...

[jj_28]

On the subject of quality of pitches used in domestic cricket, and the need to raise the standard, Ganguly expressed satisfaction with the debate during the meeting. "The emphasis will be on pitches, the BCCI Pitch Committee will visit every venue to make sure the pitches are good," said Ganguly. "We've suggested some minor changes; overall it's a simple game and let's leave it like that." :hitler:

[MCcricket]

Ganguly's statement is in reference to 5 days games in Qualifying stages and 6 day continuation of play for results in knockout games, pitch samples from all venues being sent to IIT , where soil will be looked at and the best composition for sporting wickets will be selected and implemented before the rains, also the 12 over quota for one bowler in odi. Overall good changes, more games, longer season, rest between games as each group has 9 teams and each week one team will get rest , also most games being played on weekends, overall good changes, also good changes for odi tournaments.

[vipin]

What we need is a fair spread of good and testing tricky (seaming, swinging, bouncing, spinning) pitches. Not BEST pitches.

[vvvslaxman]

. Will they be good enough to make 100s? we will have to wait and see. Last 10 years we have a total of 25 centuries in SA/OZ/England.. Dravid 7 Sachin 6 Laxman 3 Sehwag 3 Gangu 2 Kohli 1 Jaffer 1 Aggy 1 Anil 1 Majority of the 100s were scored by Dravid and Sachin. Dravid gone now. Justifiably so. Sachin will be gone in a year or two (hopefully) alongwith Lachu. It will be down to Delhi boys to carry the burden from here on as they will be the most experienced. Gauti,Viru, Kohli. Rest are pure unknown quantities. Don't know what to expect.

[MCcricket]

Sporting tracks, adequate rest period, u 25 cricket are positive changes, bowlers will get more rest, better wickets to bowl on, more games to prove their form, also late bloomers will have a chance to show what they can do, especially bowlers as bowlers need more help might be coming back from injury and missing couple of seasons or matured late.

[jind]

the Mushtaq ali t20 probably needs to be scrapped considering IPL is there. Btw, what are the likely groups for the Elite tier? Plus the t20 Champions League needs to be scrapped...waste of an idea considering IPL is already there...plus the tournament is too much skewed towards IPL teams, i.e 4 IPL teams + IPL teams retain the int'l players...and some countries only having 1 team, etc... very biased. In addition, this international club t20 cricket doesn't make sense if international cricket is still the pinnacle including t20 WC. Champions league only makes sense if there was no IPL and club cricket was the way to go.. I woudn't want that to be honest.

[Sooda]

Cant believe they have frakked up Duleep trophy- in terms of quality that was the best tournament. That could/should have been extended to what it used to be, a league format. Zonal structure gave it some purpose, a team 'picked by selectors' will have no cohesion. And no inviting of foreign teams and giving them a first hand view of Indian conditions before they potentially tour as test cricketers. The changes proposed here do not help, still a lot of average cricket

[Chandan]

that is why I favor Duleep trophy to be extended. There is lot of mediocrity in Ranji trophy teams. Duleep concentrates that and brings best of the zonal players to a single team which makes teams better. Look at what happened this Duleep trophy. East zone won it, but when those east zone players play for their respective teams, their teams barely win anything apart from Bengal, but when they came together formed a winning team.

Cant believe they have frakked up Duleep trophy- in terms of quality that was the best tournament. That could/should have been extended to what it used to be, a league format. Zonal structure gave it some purpose, a team 'picked by selectors' will have no cohesion. And no inviting of foreign teams and giving them a first hand view of Indian conditions before they potentially tour as test cricketers. The changes proposed here do not help, still a lot of average cricket

There are many journalists/ former cricketers who want Duleep trophy to be scrapped altogether. Akash didn't give me any reason for it when I asked him (maybe he missed my question) but Bhogle has given the reasons in the following article. In his opinion, tournaments like DT and Challenger trophy encourage individual play not team game and we want players playing for the team we'll have to encourage such a tournament since grassroot. I think he has a point here but I just don't know how you can stop the average play in Ranji trophy where we have 27 teams and more than 281 players playing in a season! Here is Harsha's article: A step ahead for Indian cricket The restructured Ranji Trophy sounds like an improvement, but why do we still have the Duleep? Harsha Bhogle June 15, 2012 At last, some light at the end of what seemed an interminable tunnel. India's domestic cricket, as contemporary as the long-playing record and as effective as a coalition government, is letting itself change a bit. It was doing India's cricket no good at all, and while you could still do a bit of nitpicking with what this committee has come up with, the intent is admirable, and it will be disappointing if the changes are not accepted immediately. As readers of this column may be aware, I have argued that the ideal number of teams in the Ranji Trophy is 12. Playing 27 teams entails diluting quality far too much. India's domestic cricket has long been irrelevant and uncompetitive, and at last that has been accepted. No change can begin unless there is an acceptance that the present system is ineffective. We still have 27 teams (the political reality, as we see every day, often comes in the way of a greater good) but the marginal teams, those that bring the overall standard down, will now be marginalised further with the suggestion that you have three divisions of nine teams each. It might be harsh on them but if promotion to a higher group isn't an incentive, maybe they shouldn't be playing anyway. There is an attempt to make each match competitive by allowing the top three in each of the first two groups to play the knockouts and the bottom two to go down. This is especially true of level two, where you could finish outside the top two, and therefore not be promoted, but still have the opportunity of playing the knockouts. And there is an opportunity for level three teams, with the top two allowed into the quarter-finals. You could say that having two teams from the bottom nine will dilute the level of the knockout stage, but it could be just the reward for a team with ambition - as we saw with Rajasthan a couple of years ago. And even a team that finishes fourth in level one will have played eight first-class games, which is a couple short of ideal but better than how it is now. The perfect follow-up to this would have been a respectful burial for the Duleep Trophy. When you are playing enough first-class games for your state side, there is nothing to be gained from the Duleep Trophy. Worse still, it promotes individual play, as that other irrelevant tournament, the Challenger, does too. Any tournament that has as its objective the promotion of individual effort and does nothing to promote a team ethic has to be scrapped, and so, while the Duleep Trophy honours one of our greats, it actually harms our cricket. So does the Challenger. By allowing the winner of the Vijay Hazare Trophy to be one of the three teams involved, that is lessened marginally, but it is still an unnecessary tournament. Sometimes a body gets healthier by removing toxins. If you want domestic cricket to produce hardened team players, you cannot have events where players are just distributed around. Playing for two teams, a state team and the national team, should be good enough. By allowing two bouncers an over in limited-overs cricket, this committee is testing batsmen a bit more and aligning rules to international limited-overs cricket, which is how it should be. It has also shown a desire to innovate by allowing one bowler 12 overs and keeping the others down to a maximum of ten. It will be interesting to see how captains play this, because, as with the Supersub, sometimes good ideas can be rendered ineffective by poor use by captains. And right at the bottom of the pyramid comes a very interesting change. The Under-22 tournament as we knew it will no longer exist and will be replaced by the state A team, which can take players upto 25. For too long India's cricket has been obsessed with age, and that, as everyone knows, is an invitation to produce imaginative dates of birth. Many years ago the South Zone had a tournament everyone called the Junior State (the P Ramchandra Rao Trophy). You could play in it till you were 25, but not after you had made your Ranji Trophy debut. In essence it was an opportunity to look at players at a level higher than the top city league. It worked really well then, and I often wondered why the idea wasn't implemented elsewhere. Now it is going to be, but with teams allowed to play three Ranji Trophy players. I think it works well without the three, but I can see how having them is an attempt not just to make it more competitive but also to allow out-of-form state players to make a comeback. In the overall revamp it might seem like a small thing, but it shows an attention to detail that is heartwarming. Maybe we need to look at this as Reforms 1.0, to be followed soon enough - no later than a year - by Reforms 2.0. There is room for other reforms too, especially to do with pitches; accounting in national and, especially, state bodies; and the remuneration structure for Test cricket, which should be at the heart of retaining that form of the game. Ah, and one other thing. You put good people in good positions and you get good results.

[jind]

So the elite Group A will be the most competitive as it will have the best teams...... Here's last year's group standings As per the suggestions, the winners and runner ups make the Elite A group along with 7 other top teams how do they find top 7 teams since one group has 8 teams and other 7? :hmmm: Elite Group A Rajasthan (winners) Tamil Nadu (runner ups) Mumbai Karnataka Madhya Pradesh Haryana (made the knockouts) What about the last 3? :hmmm:

[Marut]

A test equivalent of IPL, with foreign talents playing three, four, five day games in India would be superb. Eight franchisee teams playing a test like league is a juicy prospect. Sporting tracks would make it all the more better. Just wishful thinking at best.