Watching Tendulkar vs Manoj Prabhakar, street-light interviews with Venkatesh Prasad and filing stories using telex: My Duleep Trophy memories

There was a time when a Duleep Trophy assignment meant something.

For a young cricket journalist, it wasn’t just another domestic match to cover and file. It was a step in the journey. You covered local cricket, then Ranji Trophy, then, if you were good enough and had learnt enough about the game, you got to travel for the bigger domestic assignments. Duleep Trophy was almost the final step before international cricket.

I came from a time when journalists’ progress was measured that way.

I started with local matches and then began covering Ranji Trophy games in Delhi. Later, I was allowed to travel for crucial Ranji matches. But Duleep Trophy was still out of bounds. You had to understand cricket properly to cover it. If you had followed Ranji Trophy within your zone, you would know the players who were likely to feature for North Zone, West Zone, South Zone or Central Zone. You would know the players moving on to the Deodhar Trophy as well.

So when I eventually got to cover the Duleep Trophy, my contemporaries told me, “You are one step away from getting an international game.”

They were right. After three or four years of regular domestic coverage, I got an international match. That was the process then. It was a process for journalists just as it was for cricketers.

The Duleep Trophy itself had an intensity that is difficult to explain today. A North versus West game could feel like an India-Sri Lanka or India-New Zealand match. Perhaps not India-Pakistan, but certainly something close in intensity. The best players wanted to play. Nobody wanted to miss it.

Getting into a Duleep Trophy team was a big deal for the players. I remember one player discovering that he had been selected for the North Zone side. We did not have mobile phones then. He came straight to our office at The Hindu.

“ Bhaiya, my name has come up in Duleep Trophy,” he told me.

Look at the excitement in that. He wanted to know who else had been picked. He understood what it meant. He was now in line for an India call-up.

But nothing was guaranteed. You could have a wonderful Ranji Trophy season, get picked for Duleep Trophy and then disappear if you did not perform when it mattered. You had to be consistent. If you did not do well in two matches, you could be dropped.

That was the attraction of the tournament. It was a proving ground.

I remember Praveen Amre’s Duleep Trophy record. It was amazing. He was at his best against strong opposition, whether he was representing Central Zone against North, South or West. Players like him gave the tournament its character.

And then there was the experience of actually covering it.

There was no television to fall back on. If you missed a ball, a catch or a boundary, you had missed it. You could not go back and watch a replay. Perhaps a colleague had seen it and could tell you what had happened, but otherwise you had to watch every ball carefully.

That was an education.

Three sessions of intense cricket, and you had to be completely switched on. You could not afford to sit back and assume you would catch the important moments later on television. There was no later.

The travel was another part of the experience. A domestic assignment was itself a huge achievement. You would often go two days before the match, spend time with the players and then return after it. Many times, you travelled with the team and returned with the team.

Today, that may sound unusual. Those were different times.

Some of my strongest memories are from places you would not immediately associate with big cricket. Bhilai, for instance, hosted a Duleep Trophy final in October 1987.

And what a match that was.

Raman Lamba was extraordinary. West Zone skipper Aunshuman Gaekwad had scored a double hundred, and the opposition had put up a formidable score. West Zone had a decent attack, with Raju Kulkarni and Rashid Patel among the bowlers. But Lamba was in one of those moods when he seemed unstoppable.

He kept going.

He eventually made 320. When he got out, he came back to the dressing room and threw his bat down. The others were shocked.

One of the players asked him, “Why are you throwing the bat? You have got a triple century?”

He said, “But I missed 400.”

That was Raman Lamba. He had just scored 320 and was disappointed because he had not scored 400.

North eventually made 868. Lamba had done his job and then some. But what stays with me is not merely the score. It is the intensity with which these players approached a domestic game.

And covering a match in Bhilai had its own challenges.

First, you had to get there. Train. Then accommodation. Then communication.

How did you send a report from a place like Bhilai? Telex, fax, whatever was available. Sometimes the report would reach the office after 10 at night. You would miss the first edition and hope to make the second because there was simply no proper connection to send the copy.

Fax came much later.

Yet we never complained. The hosts were generally fantastic. They would go out of their way to make your life comfortable.

I remember going to Ludhiana for an Irani Cup final. There was no fax machine in the press box. So they deputed runners. They would take our pages, run about half a kilometre to where the fax machines were, send them, run back, collect the next page and repeat the exercise.

I had one advantage. I wrote quickly.

So instead of making the poor fellow run back and forth for every page, I would finish the report and give him all three pages together.

That was the world we worked in.

Another Duleep Trophy assignment took me to Baroda, Surat and Valsad. And I still remember the Valsad pitch.

It was easily one of the finest pitches I had seen in domestic cricket.

The late Narayan Satham was the curator. He had been a medium-pacer himself, and perhaps that was why he knew what he wanted from a pitch. The ball carried. It bounced. Even the players were surprised.

People wondered what kind of pitch Satham had prepared. Would the match finish too quickly?

His answer was simple: “If you are good, you will last.”

That pitch remains in my memory.

So does Motibaug Stadium in Vadodara. It was a great venue, though it has faded away now. There were hardly any spectators. You could sit almost anywhere and watch the game. It was a very different atmosphere from what we associate with cricket today.

But that North Zone-West Zone game in Vadodara is memorable to me for much more than the cricket.

The local journalists were an important part of the experience. A.D. Vyas was a journalist with enormous influence in Vadodara, and he invited Ajay Jadeja and me for dinner. It turned into one of those unforgettable evenings, full of stories and anecdotes.

Jadeja was already a figure who attracted attention. He was mobbed. Yet, at the same time, the occasion was still intimate enough for a journalist to sit down over dinner with a player and spend an evening exchanging stories.

There was another moment that stays with me. The late Jaywant Lele, a senior BCCI office-bearer at the time, came to the railway station to receive us reporters.

Imagine that today. A senior cricket administrator coming to the station to receive journalists arriving for a domestic match.

It tells you something about the stature that domestic cricket, and the people covering it, once had.

The player-journalist relationship was part of that world.

Meanwhile, in Valsad, the ground was small and proper, and you could sometimes watch the game from the rooms where you were staying.

The hospitality was remarkable. One local host, Mr Patel, a businessman and a senior figure in the local cricket association, went out of his way for the players and journalists.

And then there were the little stories that had nothing to do with the scorecard.

On one occasion, I was with my friend Manoj Vatsyayana of the Hindustan Times when he needed an interview with Venkatesh Prasad, who had been picked for a tour. Prasad happened to be returning from somewhere, so we caught him and asked if he could speak to us.

He agreed.

There was just one problem. Vatsyayana had a pen but no notebook.

He found a cigarette packet and wrote the interview on it.

Prasad was probably wondering what on earth was going on. But the interview got done, and it was a good one.

Those were the days.

The relationship between players and journalists was different too. There was a great deal of mutual respect. The players knew that you had travelled there to do your job, just as they had travelled there to do theirs.

And because you spent so much time together, there was camaraderie.

I remember that North Zone-West Zone assignment in Vadodara particularly well because the West Zone team was staying at our hotel. Ravi Shastri, Surendra Bhave, Vinod Kambli, Sanjay Manjrekar, Santosh Jedhe, Kiran More, Sanjay Patil, Salil Ankola, Iqbal Siddiqui and others were there.

And there was one more name: Sachin Tendulkar.

Sachin was with us. We interacted with him regularly. Today, if you tell someone you had dinner with Tendulkar, it sounds like an extraordinary privilege. For us then, it was simply part of the assignment. Either he would call us, or we would go over to his place.

That was the relationship between the media and players at the time.

I remember that particular North versus West game vividly. West Zone were bowled out for 187. There were big names everywhere. North had Manoj Prabhakar, Navjot Sidhu, Ajay Jadeja, Aashish Kapoor, Maninder Singh and Bhupinder Singh.

These things may sound ordinary now, but they were not ordinary then.

The festive season added another dimension. The tournament was often played around October, and if you were in Gujarat during that period, you could hardly avoid garba.

Every evening, somebody would come and say, “ Chalo ji, aaj idhar jaana hai.”

I would go along because I loved Gujarati food.

The players would dance. I couldn’t dance for nuts. We would walk back at one or two in the morning and then turn up the next day to play cricket.

And we journalists knew it. That was part of the camaraderie. You were not sitting there waiting to expose somebody. You were sharing an experience with them.

In that same North Zone-West Zone match, Vinod Kambli was caught off Obaid Kamal but believed the ball had come off his shoulder. He protested aggressively to umpire Srinivasa Venkataraghavan. During Tea, Venkat called Kambli and Sachin Tendulkar to the tent and warned that Kambli would take no further part if he repeated it. I was in the next tent and overheard everything. I could have reported it, but I asked Venkat if we could. “I knew you were in the next tent,” Venkat said. That was the trust and rigour of those times: even with such access, you still sought permission before putting something sensitive in print.

That was an unforgettable phase of my life.

The small venues were difficult. There were no people around to give you information. There were no easy sources. You had to go to the market, talk to people, find what you could and then file the report.

Sometimes the biggest challenge was simply getting the copy out.

The biggest advantage we had at The Hindu was a gentleman called Vijay Raghavan, who was in the teleprinter section in Delhi. If we were struggling to send a report through fax or telex, he would call us on STD and take the report.

Other reporters would feel jealous.

They would say, “See, this reporter is free.”

There were so many little things that made the job what it was.

Looking back, I think that was the beauty of covering Duleep Trophy in those days. It was not merely about watching some of the best cricketers in the country. It was about travelling with them, eating with them, talking to them, learning about the game and learning about journalism at the same time.

It was about the journey as much as the match.

It was about reaching a place like Bhilai by train, figuring out how to send a report, watching Raman Lamba score 320 and complaining that he had missed 400. It was about the Valsad pitch, the hospitality, the Gujarati food, the garba nights and the local journalists who became part of the experience.

For the players, Duleep Trophy could be the road to India. For journalists, covering it could be the road to an international assignment.

That is why those games mattered so much. Those were lovely days of domestic cricket. And lovely days of being a cricket journalist.

Published on Sep 11, 2026

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