Duleep Trophy to be played under lights again

The tournament will be played between three teams in a day-night format, like last year.

Abhinav Mukund will lead the India Red team.

The Duleep Trophy this season will resemble the tournament last year, with three teams - India Blue, India Green, and India Red - participating in four-day day-night fixtures, the BCCI has announced. Kanpur and Lucknow will host the event, which is scheduled for September 7 to September 29. The three teams will play each other before the final in Lucknow beginning September 29.

Abhinav Mukund, Parthiv Patel and Suresh Raina have been chosen to lead India Red, India Green and India Blue respectively. Overall, 45 well-known cricketers in the domestic circuit have been selected to play.

Mumbai opener Prithee Shaw, who impressed in last season’s Ranji Trophy knock-out and had an excellent Under-19 tour of England recently, does not feature in the list. “We will groom him and he will come in at some stage of the tournament. Some players will be selected for the India A team that will play New Zealand,” BCCI senior national selection committee said.

Amid reports of the BCCI mulling scrapping the Duleep Trophy, Sourav Ganguly had written a letter to concerned individuals to communicate his support for the tourney to be held in last year’s terms. Ganguly, president of the Cricket Association of Bengal and member of the Cricket Advisory Committee, has shown inclination to the concept of pink-ball multi-day cricket. Under his supervision, the CAB hosted India’s first-ever professional pink-ball game, the final of the first-division tournament in Kolkata which was telecast live by broadcaster Star Sports .

Teams

India Red: Abhinav Mukund (c), Priyank Panchal, Sudip Chatterjee, Ishank Jaggi, Ambati Rayudu, Dinesh Karthik, Rishabh Pant (wk), Baba Indrajith, K. Gowtham, Karn Sharma, Basil Thampi, Dhawal Kulkarni, Ashok Dinda, Rahul Singh, C. V. Milind.

India Green: Murali Vijay, R. Samarth, P. Chopra, Shreyas Iyer, Karun Nair, Ankit Bawne, Parthiv Patel (c and wk), Shahbaz Nadeem, Parvez Rasool, Navdeep Saini, Mohammed Siraj, Sidharth Kaul, Mayank Dagar, Nitin Saini, Aniket Choudhary.

India Blue: Suresh Raina (c), Samit Gohel, K. S. Bharat, A. R. Easwaran, Manoj Tiwari, Deepak Hooda, Vijay Shankar, Ishan Kishan (wk), Jayant Yadav, Bhargav Bhatt, K. M. Gandhi, Ishant Sharma, Ankit Rajpoot, S. Kamat, Jaydev Unadkat.

Schedule

India Red v India Green: September 7-10 (Lucknow)

India Red v India Blue: September 13-16 (Kanpur)

India Blue v India Green: September 19-22 (Kanpur)

FINAL: September 25-29 (Lucknow).