Deodhar Trophy set to return for 2023-24 season

CHENNAI: The return of the Deodhar Trophy and the U-23 Women’s tournaments are the key highlights of the tentative domestic schedule the Board of Control for Cricket in India has prepared for the upcoming 2023-24 season. The eight-month-long season is set to start with the Duleep Trophy in the last week of June.

With the 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup, which is likely to see 48 games happen over 46 days, scheduled to be played in October-November and the home series India men and women are set to play before and after, respectively, the global event, the BCCI seems to be keen on starting the domestic season much earlier than they do regularly. For example, the last season began only on September 8 2022 with the Duleep Trophy, unlike the tentative schedule they have prepared for the 2023-24 season.

Deodhar Trophy, which was last conducted in 2019 before the pandemic broke, is back on the calendar and is likely to be played from July 24 to August 3 and could be played in the zonal format. The Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, which will be played between October 16 to November 6, and Vijay Hazare Trophy (November 23 - December 15) will follow the Irani Cup which is expected to be played from October 1-5.

The premier red-ball tournament of the season, Ranji Trophy, will be played in two separate categories as plate and elite in the upcoming season. The league stages of both elite and plate groups will begin on January 5, 2024. The plate group knockouts will be played from February 9-22, 2024  followed by the elite group knockouts which will start on February 23 and end in the third week of March. Similarly, the Col. CK Nayudu Trophy, the men’s U-23 multi-day tournament, and Cooch Behar Trophy, the men’s U-19 multi-day tournament, too, are likely to be played in elite and plate categories separately in the 2023-24 season.

For the women, the key and welcome change is the inclusion of the U-23 one-dayers and T20 tournaments which were left out after introducing the U-15 tournament last season. The age-group tournament plays a vital role in providing game time for players who are over 19 and not necessarily a part of the senior state teams. However, the tentative calendar does not include the T20 and One Day Challengers for the senior women and the Inter-Zonal tournament for the 50-over format.