Vidarbha: the making of a modern-day domestic cricket giant

Prashant Vaidya was once rated the fastest bowler in India. He will quickly remind you though that a certain Javagal Srinath was very fast, too.

Unlike Srinath’s, Vaidya’s career was cut short by injuries; he ended up playing just four ODIs. But, he went on to play a key role in turning Vidarbha into one of the giants of domestic cricket, from an outfit that used to be the third best among the three teams from the State of Maharashtra in the Ranji Trophy.  

Spectacular achievement

Last month, Vidarbha lifted its third Ranji Trophy in seven seasons. For a team that, Vaidya says, even cricketers didn’t know existed during his playing days, that is quite an achievement: remember, glamorous teams like Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad haven’t won Indian cricket’s most prestigious domestic title as many times.

The first of those titles came in 2017-18, after shocking Delhi in its maiden final by nine wickets at Indore. Chandrakant Pandit, probably the most successful coach in Indian cricket, was in charge of the team. Skipper Faiz Fazal led from the front, scoring 912 runs at 70.15.

The following year, Fazal’s men retained their crown, beating Saurashtra by 78 runs in the final, which they played at home. Five years later, Vidarbha lost the final in Mumbai to the host.

The team was back in the familiar environs of Jamtha for this year’s final. Vidarbha, in fact, played all its three knockout matches at home: that was because it had scored, in the league stage, more points than its rivals, Tamil Nadu, Mumbai and Kerala.

After beating Tamil Nadu and Mumbai outright, Vidarbha was very much the favourite against Kerala, which was playing its maiden final. The host could not force another outright win, but a first-innings lead of 37 runs proved enough in the end for its third title: with a superb second-innings hundred, Karun Nair batted Kerala out of the match.

Vidarbha had done the right thing last season by signing Karun up after the Test triple-centurion was dropped by Karnataka. It was Kerala that he had first approached, though — it is the State of his origin. But the Kerala Cricket Association officials seemingly weren’t keen, and Karun spoke of it in numerous interviews with the large media contingent that had travelled to Nagpur from Kerala.

This wasn’t the first time Vidarbha was making good use of talent from beyond its borders. The Mumbai-made run-machine, Wasim Jaffer, was a part of the Vidarbha team that won the Ranji trophy on the two previous occasions.  

Shortly after the final ended, Vidarbha coach Usman Ghani was asked by a reporter if it was time for the team to field only home-grown players. “No, we will need the services of players like Karun,” he said. “Ours is a young batting side and we need guidance from the professionals.”

Coming of age

Some of those young batters seem to be coming of age. Yash Rathod, in fact, was the Ranji Trophy’s leading run-getter, with 960 runs, while Danish Malewar made 783 and was the player-of-the-final with scores of 153 and 73. The season’s highest wicket-taker is also from Vidarbha — Harsh Dubey, who scalped 69 with his left-arm spin.

Vaidya is delighted that Vidarbha is now producing so many quality young cricketers. 

“I remember the first time I got selected in the Indian team, a senior player asked me where I was from,” he tells The Hindu. “When I told him I started my cricket with Vidarbha, he asked me if Vidarbha had a Ranji Trophy team. So it is gratifying to note that we have come a long way from those days, when people didn’t even know that we played Ranji Trophy. At the national level, we have won about a dozen trophies in the last eight years.”

So how did it all begin?

“Shashank Manohar [former BCCI president] asked me to join the Vidarbha Cricket Association as an administrator and we came up with this idea of starting an academy, way back in 2008-09,” Vaidya recalls. “And we wanted to focus on junior cricket. This stadium, at Jamtha, had not come up yet, and we started the academy at the old stadium. That is where I believe the whole thing started. The seeds were sown there.”

As the director of the academy, Vaidya wanted to draft youngsters from outside Nagpur. “We wanted to focus more on talents in the districts, I felt there was a lot of talent there,” he says. 

“When I was in the Ranji Trophy team for Vidarbha, we hardly had any representation from outside Nagpur. The entire playing eleven would be from Nagpur; maybe one odd player here or there. Now in any age group, half of the team is from the districts. In the first year of our academy, we selected about 60 kids in the under-16 and 19 categories.”

Then Vaidya ensured the services of excellent coaches. “We had Sulakshan Kulkarni join us,” says Vaidya, now the chairman of the development committee of the VCA. “Then we got Subroto Banerjee to come as a bowling coach. And we also roped in Neil D’Costa from Australia.”

He says the players are still picked from open trials. “We do that every summer. We have a mass selection programme. We announce it and just go and randomly select players.”

Within a few years of starting the academy, Vidarbha began to do well in the age-group tournaments. “We were qualifying for the knockout stages, but only when you win a trophy, will people take note. That happened with us in 2016-17, when we won the Vijay Merchant Trophy (Under-16). And Harsh Dubey is from that lot.”

Spark of inspiration

Then, of course, came Vidarbha’s greatest moment: its first Ranji Trophy title. Vaidya gives a lot of credit to coach Pandit.

“I always wanted him, after playing a lot of cricket in Mumbai,” he says. “I had a very good relationship with Chandu for so many years. I knew he was the coach Vidarbha needed. I had tried to get him even before, in 2012-13, but he was always engaged. In 2016-17, he was relieved by Mumbai and when I met him at Dilip Vengsarkar’s daughter’s wedding reception, I told him he had to come to Vidarbha now.”

Pandit accepted the invitation. “The rest is history,” says Vaidya, smiling. “Chandu was part of the process of selection and we involved him in everything, and gave him complete freedom. Winning the Ranji Trophy remains the happiest moment of my career.”

It looks like there will be more happy moments for Vaidya and others involved with Vidarbha cricket.