The Unlogged Ledger of Ranji and Syed Mushtaq Ali: The Domestic Cricket Data Nobody Bothered to Record

One morning at an empty ground in Bengaluru, with a cup of tea, I logged 47 overs ball-by-ball into my notebook. The scorecard for that day recorded one line: 'fifty, 41 balls, 6 fours.' What went unrecorded was that in the first 12 balls of that innings the batsman survived three edges, twice the ball flew in the air toward slip, and in the fifth over he used his feet against a spinner the way a Test batsman does, not a domestic one. Forty minutes later that fifty became a story about a 'promising talent' — and the story had no data behind it. Sixty-four matches, one hostel room, and a spreadsheet nobody will ever see — that is where my work begins.

The crisis in domestic cricket is not a shortage of talent. It is that nobody keeps a public account of that talent. Ranji Trophy, Vijay Hazare, Syed Mushtaq Ali and Duleep Trophy together produce thousands of innings, thousands of spells and millions of deliveries every season. How many of those deliveries have publicly available ball-by-ball records? Almost none. Every shot, every dot ball, every field placement in the IPL is captured by three cameras and two data feeds. Meanwhile a Ranji quarter-final, in which a 22-year-old fast bowler produces the most controlled spell of his career, shrinks to two lines in a local newspaper. This inequality is not about coverage. It is about selection.

My own sheet contains 64 domestic matches from that season that I could physically attend, log and score myself. That number sounds large — in reality it is roughly a third of the season's total domestic matches, and I picked only the ones I could reach overnight from Bengaluru. A bias toward southern venues has been in my dataset from day one. So when I say that Indian seamers with dot-ball control above 60% in the Syed Mushtaq Ali were undervalued at auction by an average of 1.2 crore, I first have to state that I did not watch the whole tournament, only the 21 matches I counted myself. Beyond the scorecard, that gap is the real story: selection committees and franchise scouts both decide on the data that is easy to capture — runs, wickets, strike rate — and leave everything else to oral tradition, second-hand reports and 'he looked good in the nets.'

The consequence of this gap is that some careers are decided in matches for which no ball-by-ball record exists. A 20-year-old leg-spinner concedes 38 in four overs in a Vijay Hazare knockout and disappears from the list for the next season — even though three of those balls became fours through batsman error, which I marked separately in my sheet. The scorecard's 38 sits in that spinner's head for six months. That is what the ledger does: the bowler is always blamed for the runs, and it is not always the bowler's fault. After the IPL's data revolution, the Indian domestic cricketer does not have the safety net a costly overseas player has — because the public evidence does not exist, no player can prove that his 38 was really a 50.

A senior coach says he saw the batsman 'play from the front.' That is an input my model cannot see. I learned this five years ago on a panel — the only woman among five — that when someone asks 'have you actually watched the games?', the answer should come from the codebook, not the eyes. But the reverse is equally true: a coach's eye sometimes catches a role change that my two-season sample misses. The honest position is that I should leave one qualitative observation per piece that is bigger than the model, and state what evidence would make me withdraw my threshold.

Six months before the mega auction I wrote the memo nobody asked for. It contained one thing: a list of Indian seamers with death-overs economy under 8.5 and control percentage above 60 in 2026. I sent it to ten franchises; none replied. Six months later the auction table answered — the same memo was used in my firm's client briefing, and the same logic is repeated in retention meetings today. In sport, price is set by what people can count. What is not counted drops out of a player's career, however well he played.

But here I doubt my own method. Does the absence of public data really destroy careers, or does the living oral network of the domestic circuit — coaches, former players, small-town reporters — sometimes do the work the scorecard cannot? Some names have risen purely through that network, with no public numbers at all. I call this 'informal data' — less reliable, but not zero. My suggestion is to systematise it, not dismiss it: place a trained scorer with every Ranji team to record only ball quality, catch difficulty and fielding position. It is not a large investment, and it can fill a gap nobody has filled yet.

In the coming season, when you hear about a domestic player — in one line of a newspaper, in a scout's oral report — ask: who counted the completed passes? The stadium was empty. I stayed ninety minutes and counted anyway. In my sheet that player may not look the way he looks on the scorecard. And the next auction table is waiting for that sheet.