Last week Vidarbha created history by winning the Ranji Trophy as well as the Irani Trophy in two successive years. When Vidarbha won the Ranji Trophy for the first time last year, some dubbed it as a fluke. But the team disproved the naysayers by successfully defending its title this year. The team lacks major stars, but as captain Faiz Fazal said, it was the contribution of all the members of the team that helped them achieve this feat.

But a major part of the team’s success should go to coach Chandrakant Pandit and veteran batsman Wasim Jaffer. Pandit took over the reins of Vidarbha after helping Mumbai win the trophy in 2015. After Pandit moved to Vidarbha, he invited Jaffer to join his team as he was dropped from the Mumbai team. Jaffer at 40 showed that his appetite for runs remains undiminished and is now the highest run-getter in Ranji Trophy.

But it would be unfair to credit only these two for Vidarbha’s success as the local talent played no small part in it. Faiz Fazal, Atharva Taide, Aditya Sarwate, Rajneesh Gurbani, Akshay Wadkar, Akshay Karnewar, Ganesh Satish and Sanjay Ramaswamy are not household names. But it is these journeymen cricketers who keep grinding the wheels of domestic cricket in India.

Vidarbha’s success also marks an important shift in Indian cricket — from the ‘metropolitan to the mofussil’. Though Vidarbha’s home-ground Nagpur is hardly a ‘mofussil’ town, in strictly cricketing terms it could be seen as one especially in contrast to the traditional cricket centres such as Mumbai, Delhi, Karnataka, Hyderabad and Tamil Nadu. This shift, which began more than a decade-and-a-half ago when players such as MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and Piyush Chawla broke into the Indian team, has now become more pronounced.

Vidarbha’s success augurs well for Indian cricket as the game has become more ‘democratic’ in its geographic spread.

Senior Deputy Editor

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