Another Year! Another domestic season kicks-off! Get ready for some action Paltan as Aapla Dada Surya, Ishan Kishan, Tilak Varma and Anshul Kamboj are geared up to take part in the domestic season-opening Duleep Trophy.

The tournament is scheduled to start on September 5 at Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh and at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore and will run till September 22 with four teams selected by the BCCI’s selection committee playing against each other once. There will not be any knockout games with the team finishing on top of the points table declared as winners.

Aapla Dada Surya comes into the red-ball mould after a successful first T20I series as captain of the Indian team that defeated Sri Lanka 3-0, where he was also the top run-getter and the Player of the Series. Absolute red-hot form stuff!

Meanwhile Ishan Kishan, after a tough start to the year, would be itching to get going. He’d be captaining Jharkhand in the Buchi Babu trophy, and would be hoping to hit the ground running to get this season off to a flier.

Tilak Varma will return to the fold once again after he suffered a wrist injury in the later part of IPL 2024 which also forced him out of reckoning for the Zimbabwe tour. He will be raring to make up for the lost time, while Anshul Kambhoj, after impressing everyone with his exploits in the IPL and for Punjab, will be itching to learn and impress some more with the big boys.

It’s exciting. Cricket in whites is always special. Bring on the domestic season already! 

Duleep Trophy squads

TEAM A

Shubman Gill (c), Mayank Agarwal, Riyan Parag, Dhruv Jurel, KL Rahul, Tilak Varma, Shivam Dube, Tanush Kotian, Kuldeep Yadav, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Khaleel Ahmed, Avesh Khan, Vidwath Kaverappa, Kumar Kushagra, Shaswat Rawat.

TEAM B

Abhimanyu Easwaran (c), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sarfaraz Khan, Rishabh Pant, Musheer Khan, Nitish Kumar Reddy*, Washington Sundar, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohd Siraj, Yash Dayal, Mukesh Kumar, Rahul Chahar, R Sai Kishore, Mohit Awasthi, N Jagadeesan (wk).

TEAM C

Ruturaj Gaikwad (c), Sai Sudharsan, Rajat Patidar, Abishek Porel (wk), Suryakumar Yadav, B Indrajith, Hrithik Shokeen, Manav Suthar, Umran Malik, Vyshak Vijaykumar, Anshul Khamboj, Himanshu Chauhan, Mayank Markande, Aryan Juyal (wk), Sandeep Warrier.

TEAM D

Shreyas lyer (c), Atharva Taide, Yash Dubey, Devdutt Padikkal, Ishan Kishan (WK), Ricky Bhui, Saransh Jain, Axar Patel, Arshdeep Singh, Aditya Thakare, Harshit Rana, Tushar Deshpande, Akash Sengupta, KS Bharat (WK), Saurabh Kumar.

NOTE

*Nitish Kumar Reddy’s participation in the Duleep Trophy is subject to fitness.