BCCI bypassed Sourav Ganguly & Co before finalising domestic calendar, says Source

Did the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) keep its Technical Committee (TC), headed by Sourav Ganguly, out of loop while finalising the domestic schedule for 2018-19 season?

According to insiders in the TC, the answer is 'yes'.

It was exactly a week earlier (on July 17) that BCCI announced the biggest domestic season ever, starting with Duleep Trophy matches from August 17. The revamped Ranji Trophy schedule will consist of Elite and Plate group.

The Elite group will have three sub-groups called A, B and C. The A & B sub groups will have nine teams each while the C sub-group will consist of 10 teams. The Plate group will have one sub-group D which will feature nine new entrants including six from Northeast — Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim — while Bihar, Puducherry and Uttarakhand will add up to form this new group.

As per the BCCI's established norms, it is for the technical committee to finalise country's domestic calendar. But an insider in the TC told DNA that neither Ganguly nor any other member was consulted before increasing the number of teams to 37 or making public the schedule of over 2,000 matches.

BCCI's new Ranji regulations stipulate that five teams from Elite Group A and Elite Group B, two teams from Elite Group C and one team from Plate Group D will make it to the quarter-final. It further stipulate that the top team that qualifies for quarter-finals from the Plate Group will be promoted to Elite A & B in the next season.

The insiders claim that "this entire model is not based on the suggestions muted by TC to the Committee of Administrators (COA)".

DNA has learnt that it was not the model that TC first mooted to the COA as the members were of the view that going by past instances where the Ranji was played in Elite and Plate divisions, the selectors were not used to selecting players from the latter category.

Ganguly-led committee thus was of the view that the integration of the Northeast teams, Bihar and Uttarakhand had to be done gradually with their teams first be inducted into the age-group tournaments and proceed further as done in the case of Chhattisgarh before it was included in the Ranji fold during 2016-17 season.

The recommendations of the TC are to be sent to COA and then ratified by the BCCI general body.

The BCCI on the other hand has only one reason to differ from TC and that is Supreme Court judgement dated July 18, 2016, which made it mandatory for it to give equal representation to all states, along with affiliate members.
That was apparently the reason why COA had instead asked Saba Karim, the general manager operations and in-charge of domestic cricket, and CEO Rahul Johri to devise the domestic calender bypassing Ganguly & Co.