Vidarbha clinched the Ranji Trophy 2024-25 title on Sunday in Nagpur. (BCCI)The revelry lasted the whole evening. Vidarbha’s euphoric cricketers gathered around the pitch, muttered prayers and kept the trophy at the centre of the 22-yard strip. Some broke down in the arms of their tearful parents, the farewelling Akshay Wakhare clung onto the giant ears of the trophy, tugging it close to his chest; sweets were distributed, feet were touched in reverence, Jamtha turned into a bubble of emotions.
The moment of victory was wrought hours ago. When the digital clock mounted beside the manual scoreboard flashed 2.15, the sun scorching down, Darshan Nalkande swiped Aditya Sarwate towards midwicket to complete his half-century. The long-awaited declaration arrived, and the moment of frenzy kicked in. Vidarbha declared at 375 for 9, and Kerala’s captain conveyed the message that they won’t dare the ludicrous task of chasing down 412 in less than 40 overs. The match was drawn and the hosts won on their first-innings lead.
The rest of Vidarbha’s players stormed into the ground to pile over Nalkande and Yash Thakur, before grabbing souvenir stumps and dancing in an impromptu huddle near the pitch. Wagging their stumps, they ran a lap around the stadium. The pain of losing last year’s final, at the hands of Mumbai, was exorcised as they held the trophy aloft for the third time in seven years.
𝐕𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐛𝐡𝐚 𝐚𝐫𝐞 #𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐣𝐢𝐓𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐡𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒-𝟐𝟓 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬 🏆 🙌
Joy. Tears. Pride 😀👌
They lift the title by virtue of taking the 1st innings lead against Kerala in the Final 👏
The celebrations begin 🥳@IDFCFIRSTBank pic.twitter.com/CXjVNPPCE7
— BCCI Domestic (@BCCIdomestic) March 2, 2025
The destiny of the game was a foregone conclusion, reducing the proceedings to the seriousness of an irrelevant postscript. It was akin to the credit-roll at the end of a movie, those watched from the corner of the eyes in the hustle to exit the theatre. The mass of names doesn’t register. The action that unfolded on Sunday would barely remain in the memory of the audience or the players, until the trophy-lifting moment knocked in.
A sense of ennui swept from the start. Vidarbha’s Karun Nair attempted a flurry of reverse-sweeps and contrived to get stumped in the end, adding only three runs to his overnight score of 132. The rest batted disinterestedly, even though the wickets of Wadkar and Harsh Dubey infused remote concerns of a Kerala retaliation. It did not manifest, as even Kerala had entered the field reconciled to an inevitable loss.
Exhausted after their longest campaign in a Ranji season, they wandered like somnambulists. The pangs of defeat had long sunk in, and it would remain a bittersweet season in their consciousness. Even Karun’s departure didn’t lift their punctured spirits, or poke the belief in miracles. The appeals were faint, the movements laborious, and the celebrations mere afterthoughts.
In contrast, excitement rippled in the stands, where relatives and friends of Vidarbha players waited for the team’s coronation. The chorus of claps were as loud as a few hundred pairs of hands could be. The mood before the day’s start was one of joviality rather than jeopardy, the Vidarbha faithful congregating not in hope but in expectation. The hard yards had been done on Saturday. This was the fun part. Songs and banners.
That winning feeling 🤗
Vidarbha Captain Akshay Wadkar receives the coveted Ranji Trophy 🏆 from BCCI President Mr. Roger Binny 👏 👏
What a brilliant performance right through the season 🔥#RanjiTrophy | @IDFCFIRSTBank | #Final
Scorecard ▶️ https://t.co/up5GVaflpp pic.twitter.com/5zDGHzw8NJ
— BCCI Domestic (@BCCIdomestic) March 2, 2025
The 2024-25 victory might not be the sweetest of their three Ranji conquests — nothing matches the euphoria of hoisting the trophy for the first time — but it could be the most satisfying one. It’s the tournament where they acquired invincibility; undefeated, outrightly victorious in eight of the 10 games. Had they pressed for a win on Sunday, they could have achieved it comfortably. But they didn’t resort to banal exhibitionism, flexing their muscles only when the situation demanded. The first-innings lead accomplished, they wanted to barricade every possible comeback route for Kerala.
Revealingly, it’s a juncture in their history that captures their journey from fairy-tale spinning underdogs to a genuine domestic powerhouse with resources, skills and attitude to boss any other side in the country. The nondescript side from the sun-parched Central Indian plains has more titles (3) than some of the more storied sides in Indian cricket’s map. Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Hyderabad have fewer trophies than them. En route, they have shed the ‘upstart’ tag that haunted them even in their back-to-back title-winning years. The argument that more celebrated sides are playing without their stars, turning up for the country, holds vacuous logic now.
Moulding cricketers for the country is the next organic rung in the evolutionary cycle. The campaign — a triumph of home-spun talents— has emitted encouraging signs in this regard. Although, Karun Nair’s contributions were immense and Dhruv Shorey chimed in with valuable knocks, the primary contributors were the triumvirate of youngsters from Nagpur. Yash Rathod, the bespectacled and compact left-hander, helmed the run-scoring charts with 960 runs at 53.33; Danish Malewar, flourishes of the wrists punctuating his game, rattled out 783 runs at 52.20; Harsh Dubey, the discovery of the edition, revealed his wondrous gifts to blend orthodoxy and modernity.
Rathod, 24, is the oldest among them, his teammates call him the “studious one.” He is always working on his batting, at the nets behind the ground when he is not batting or fielding. Or he could be seen locked in intense dissections of his dismissals with the video analyst. “It was our plan to blood youngsters and we were confident that they have the game to excel at this level. And as you have seen, they have all performed really well,” points out coach Usman Ghani, who, without any hesitation, termed this the best moment of his life.
Malewar is the youngest at 21, even though he exudes a frightening maturity in the middle. He is quiet and shy, until he starts talking about batting. “He is a keen student of the game, always wants to improve his batting and fitness, always looking to learn new things,” Karun would say.
Dubey, 22, is the “intelligent one”. “Hamara Ashwin hai,” screams a support-staff member. “He has a great awareness to bowl according to the conditions. He is a very smart cricketer, and I am sure he will reach great heights,” Ghani says.
Winning the Ranji Trophy was perhaps the first step in their journey to dizzying cricketing heights.
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