Ranji Coverage, WPL Promises and the BCCI Calendar: The Part of Indian Cricket That Never Makes Headlines

For the past few seasons I have kept a habit: before any Ranji Trophy round, I open the scorecards and check, alongside them, whether video coverage of those matches exists. Placed in the same table, the two columns produce a pattern that is hard to dismiss — where there is broadcast, scorecards are more detailed, data updates faster and reporting is better. Where there is no camera, the numbers are incomplete too. This is not coincidence. It is evidence that a large portion of Indian cricket is rendered invisible by the design of the system itself.

Put this inside the frame that repeats every season. The BCCI domestic calendar is split across the Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy, Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, Vijay Hazare Trophy and the Senior Women's Trophy. Scheduling runs around the international calendar and the IPL window, not around player development or audience access. The result: much of the Ranji season is played at grounds with not a single camera, and reporting shrinks to a paragraph or two in local papers. That is not a data gap; it is a declared priority.

The Ranji Trophy's structural function and its coverage crisis are not two separate things. The tournament is Indian cricket's largest talent-scouting network — nearly every domestic player who has entered the Test side in the last decade came through first-class cricket here. Yet coverage of a network that size has never matched its scale. A decade ago, zonal selectors sat in the stands to watch players; that role is now being taken over by franchise scouts and trial-based data systems. A franchise scout has resources, but his interest lies in his team winning, not in the career of the player he is picking. When the authority to scout changes hands, the accounting should change with it — but who audits that accounting remains unclear.

My biggest worry is not the quantity of coverage but its inequality. In the same season, highlights of some Ranji matches are available while scorecards of others update late. Since 2026 I have kept this comparative record of domestic scorecards and broadcast availability, and the result is the same every time: coverage goes to teams with legacy or to grounds in big cities. Players from smaller associations score hundreds without a camera and their names do not appear in a single frame until the next auction.

Now look at the WPL the same way. The promises made when the Women's Premier League launched — broadcast quality, visibility for domestic women cricketers, a platform from which scouting would grow — exist on paper, but the yardstick of delivery shifts every season. A woman player who scores 700+ runs in the domestic circuit has no video footage available from the season in which she scored them. This is not a technology gap; every shot of an eighteen-year-old male player has a clip. It is a question of whom the system considers worth watching.

Systems are never neutral — they only hide the priorities of their design. Ranji's coverage crisis and the WPL's promise crisis are two sides of the same coin, because in both the decision is about which match is deemed "worth watching." That decision is not technical but political. When a tournament gets broadcast permission, the scouts, analysts, data agencies and fan followers attached to it all gain recognition at once. When it doesn't, the entire supply chain goes invisible. The person standing at the bottom of that chain — the Ranji batsman whose hundred was captured by no camera — is not a process but a name. Put him in the same paragraph as the mechanism, or the analysis will wash away the injustice done to him.

A contrarian angle is also needed here. It is easy to assume that less coverage means lower-quality cricket — that Ranji or domestic women's cricket is not worth watching. That is a wrong conclusion. Quality and visibility are different things, and the relationship between them can even run in reverse: sometimes the hardest hundred, made in the most difficult conditions, is hidden in the least-covered match. Those who say "domestic cricket has no depth" are really converting a visibility deficit into a quality deficit. Keep the two apart.

Similarly, blaming the BCCI for "negligence" alone is an easy route and probably an incomplete picture. The congestion of the domestic calendar, international commitments and the commercial architecture of broadcast rights together create a structure in which expanding coverage is expensive and low-margin. But that same structure also decides who gets the margin. The cost of low coverage is borne by the player; the benefit is retained by the system. That imbalance is the real issue.

So what next? Two paths are clear. First, minimum broadcast standards: uniform, uncut video availability for at least some matches in every Ranji round and all WPL matches, linked to a public data repository. Second, an audit of scouting authority: accountability between franchise scouting and zonal selection must be defined, so a player's career does not depend on one franchise's interest.

Before either happens, one question is necessary: when the next domestic hundred is scored without a camera, who holds the right to watch it — and will the system ever share that right voluntarily, or will it stay invisible until someone outside demands it?