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A former India opener has criticized senior Indian players for treating the Ranji Trophy as a formality, calling it a ‘token’ effort.
Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli (Image: AFP)
Former India opener Aakash Chopra has equated senior Indian men’s regulars’ feature in only one 2025 Ranji Trophy match each to ‘marking attendance and leaving’. He called it a ‘token’ effort, like taking punishment, and felt that playing domestic cricket should be seen as a ‘privilege’ instead.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) cracked a whip on the senior players by releasing new rules, advising them to play domestic cricket whenever they can. Rohit Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill and Rishabh Pant all played in the first round after the 2024-25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy and missed the next, currently ongoing matches. The latter are being played by Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, who missed the last round.
“Virat Kohli is playing, but many others are not, like Rohit Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal or Shreyas Iyer. Ultimately, all the players have played their token Ranji Trophy match, marked their attendance and left,” Chopra said on his YouTube channel. “Virat Kohli hadn’t played that round, so he is playing now. What does it tell you? This (playing Ranji Trophy) was a bit of a punishment posting. But playing first-class cricket shouldn’t be a punishment, it should be a privilege,” he added.
Ravindra Jadeja is the only senior who has featured in both games for Saurashtra.
Kohli has fallen behind Smith: Aakash Chopra
Chopra also spoke about Kohli’s lack of recent international returns in comparison to his counterparts like Steve Smith, Joe Root and Kane Williamson. He used a metric of centuries per number of innings played.
“Smith has scored a century (against Sri Lanka). He has struck his 35th century in just 205 innings. Root has scored 36 hundreds but he has played 278 innings. So if you look at it in terms of the strike rate, the number of innings he takes to score a century, then Steve Smith is ahead of Joe Root. However, Kane Williamson has played only 186 innings and has scored 33 hundreds. His strike rate is better than those two,” Chopra said.
“If I see Virat Kohli here, he has played 210 innings, which means he has played five more innings than Steve Smith and has five centuries fewer than him. So Virat Kohli, unfortunately, now has the least strike rate because he has scored only three centuries in the last five years,” he added.
Kohli will bat in the Ranji Trophy for the first time in almost 13 years on Friday.
