Triple ton in 3 hours, now eight 6s: Does Ranji Trophy need a rethink?

Going 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6 against Arunachal Pradesh’s Limar Dabi and Hyderabad-born T N R Mohit, Meghalaya’s No. 8 bat became the first player to smash eight consecutive sixes in first-class cricket and break the record for the fastest-ever fifty in the format in 11 deliveries.

Sobers recorded the first instance of six 6s in a first-class over in England’s premier County Championship in 1968, 17 years before Shastri matched the feat by belting Baroda’s Tilak Raj in a 1984-85 Ranji outing for what was then Bombay. Akash’s ascent may be off-putting for the connoisseurs — it transpired at the open C K Pithawala Ground against a first-class side that has tasted victory only once in 40 matches, suffering 35 outright losses.

It’s not just Arunachal. One among the nine teams that have taken flight under the BCCI since the 2018-19 season, following the Lodha Committee reforms, Meghalaya too has yet to realise a high-profile win.

As the newly inducted Northeast teams continue to be a springboard for feats bordering on the bizarre, 25-year-old Akash isn’t the first to gun down lofty records in such Ranji contests and, former players say, certainly will not be the last.

Former BCCI GM of cricket and operations, Saba Karim, said the integration of second-tier Ranji games under the First Class umbrella warrants a rethink. “With so many teams (38) in contention in the Ranji Trophy, the quality of the structure is diluted. It may not be a bad idea to have these Plate division games in Tier 2… they can attain First Class status once they are promoted to the Elite division,” Karim told The Indian Express.

The promotion-relegation of the lower-ranked sides remains “tricky”, nevertheless, as the former India wicket-keeper puts it. In the current Ranji Trophy system, the two bottom-ranked teams are relegated from the Elite division every season, while the Plate finalists replace them in the top tier the following year. Consequently, the promotion of Northeast teams and the slide of established Elite teams down the order contribute to similar otherworldly feats.

In the Mumbai-Uttarakhand quarter-final in the 2022-23 season, the record Ranji champions hammered the opposition by a staggering 725 runs — the highest win margin in the history of First Class cricket across the world. In the pre-quarter fixture of the same season, Jharkhand crushed a fledgling Nagaland by setting a never-before target, 1009.

After their stunning stumble from the Elite group, Hyderabad butchered the competition in the Plate group in 2023-24, with their opener Tanmay Agarwal breaking a multitude of first-class records in a single day. Facing Arunachal in Secunderabad, the left-hander plundered 366 runs in 181 balls, comprising multiple world records for the fastest triple century (147 balls) and most sixes (26) in an innings.

“Unless the BCCI’s working committee at the AGM figures out something like having two tiers of Ranji Trophy, I think it is very difficult. There have been encouraging signs in white-ball cricket (for shorter formats) from the Northeast, but in red-ball cricket, we can think of having a distinction,” Karim said.

Saurashtra stalwart Sheldon Jackson, who continues to hold the record for the most sixes for a Ranji Trophy team, said any demarcation between sides could be a difficult proposition for the BCCI, which hosts over 1,000 matches in a jam-packed domestic season.

“It is not easy to host 38 teams across several age-group systems and the senior level. You will have to then reconstruct the entire structure because otherwise you would not be able to relegate teams like, say, Hyderabad, from the top,” Jackson said.

The two-time Ranji Trophy winner also cautioned about the flipside of undermining records in the Plate division. “Nagaland nearly denied Tamil Nadu full points in a recent fixture. These teams have just come up in the last decade, and they are competing. You cannot come and dominate teams that may have a legacy of nearly 100 years. Some teams are evolving. You just have to monitor them, which teams are evolving and then something or the other you can do,” he said.

Jackson pointed out that it takes something above the ordinary to string eight maximums in a row, irrespective of the opposition, the pitches or the context of the game.

“If records mean so much, one should be broken in every one of these games, right? Why doesn’t it break? Ravi Shastri was a special player in his time, but you also have to be special to break those records. Every cricketer to play first-class cricket in India is a special player for the sheer competition that goes through the system,” he said.

For now, questions raised over the quality of bowling by the Arunachal bowlers will not hold – at least on paper. Akash’s half-century and eight sixes have sealed their place in history under the recognition of the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians — stamped First Class.