Vinay Rao
Every player Hyderabad has sent to Ranji and beyond came through one door — the league. It survived being disrupted once already; the courts had to step in to save it from the people running it, and it earned its credibility back the hard way, weekend after weekend. This season, the league isn’t being disrupted. It’s being made irrelevant — quietly, one decision at a time. Team counts have moved beyond what was published. A single trial outing can undo a full season of league form. And now, a brand-new U-23 Emerging Players tournament has arrived, with no stated link to how, or whether, it feeds into state selection at all.
Why Is the League Being Sidelined?
HCA’s leagues have not always sat comfortably with everyone now shaping its cricketing direction — some of that history is public record, while some of it is the kind of friction people in Hyderabad cricket don’t need spelled out to recognise. When the people with the most influence over this season’s process are also the people with the least warmth towards the league as an institution, the pattern stops looking accidental.
And it raises the harder question directly: were the teams effectively decided before league results and trials were even weighed — with team counts expanded and new tournaments layered in simply to ensure that certain pre-decided names don’t get excluded by their own league form?
If that’s what’s happening, this isn’t a new selection philosophy. It’s the same old story in a better-dressed wrapper.
Consistency Should Still Be Worth Something
A wider net for opportunity is a fine instinct, but only if it still rewards what the league is built to measure — form proven over a season, not on a single day.
What does it tell a player who has put in six-plus matches of solid league cricket when someone with a fraction of that record can leapfrog him on the strength of one trial outing?
The same logic applies to division. B Division doesn’t need special protection — it needs to be counted, in the same pool and on the same terms as A Division.
Hyderabad cricket has already seen what happens when a division label is mistaken for a ceiling on talent: Dr. M.V. Sridhar played his way to Ranji out of C Division, and nobody remembers him as a C Division cricketer.
If HCA has decided otherwise this season, say so — don’t let players find out only when their names aren’t on a list.
Fix It. Don’t Kill It.
None of this is an argument against change. A league that has run for decades can carry outdated fixtures, uneven standards or scheduling that no longer serves modern cricket — and if that’s the honest diagnosis, HCA should fix it in the open, and fix it well.
But there’s a difference between modernising a system and quietly starving it of relevance while something else gets built to replace it, unannounced.
A structure that stood the test of time and produced this city’s greats doesn’t need to be made irrelevant. It needs to be made more relevant to the way the game is run today.
The Ask
Say what counts, and say it before the lists come out, not after.
If B Division form counts, run it as one pool and say so. If the Emerging Players tournament feeds selection, publish how. If a trial can override a season, publish the threshold and hold it there — for everyone, not for whoever the exception happens to protect this time.
If the league needs fixing, fix it, and make it the best version of itself.
What it doesn’t need, and doesn’t deserve, is to be made irrelevant by the very people it helped build.
