Harsh Dubey - hand-picked by R Ashwin, forged in Vidarbha

How often do you think about, "What if I had never left cricket coaching, I might be playing for India right now?" or "What if I had not edged that ball in my inter-school final and instead scored a big hundred" or "What if I had something different for breakfast that match day and it all would have been different?"

For every million hardworking cricket aspirants who just miss their dreams every day in India, there's one hard-working kid at the right place at the right time.

"One day in Nagpur, we were going to buy notebooks and books for my fifth standard, and by mistake, we took the wrong turn and saw a cricket club called the Ruby Cricket Club.. I asked my father what it was, and he told me here is where the cricket practice happens - the professional one. I told him I will also play, and that is where it all started—that conversation," Vidarbha all-rounder Harsh Dubey told Sportskeeda, just over a week after he picked up a five-wicket haul and scored a half-century in the Ranji Trophy 2024 final against Mumbai.

The year was 2011. Harsh was 10 and the memory of seeing India lift the 2011 World Cup, and perhaps the feelings of that contagious excitement around him without perhaps quite understanding the phenomenon, were fresh in his mind.

But more importantly, he remembered that his father, Surendra, wanted to be a cricketer too but couldn't because his family didn't have the means to support him.

Surendra was an officer in the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) at the time, a transfers-extensive job that took his family from Harsh's birthplace Pune to Nagpur sometime previously. He didn't immediately realize how serious his son was that day but eventually gave in to his demands of joining the club.

Harsh's batting was an instant hit at the club and it didn't take long for him to become an integral part of his coach Dilip Das's plans.

"Our team had a weak middle order when I was playing under-13," he said. "Me and one of my friends used to open the innings. We generally played very well and often chased totals without getting out. But if one used to get out, there was no one to play in the middle or the tail. So to fix that, the coach shifted me to the middle order."

A couple of years later, when one day the usual left-arm off-spinner was absent from the nets, one of Harsh's friends told Das that he bowled a bit too.

The coach called him up and saw the revs he put behind the ball, the over-spin he got despite not being too tall, and the resulting wickets. Harsh's interest piqued too and from a 'time-pass' bowler, he began a transition into a proper all-rounder.

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Not just luck

Being at the right place at the right time - even twice - isn't enough. After the Vidarbha Inter-Academy tournament in 2014, Das convinced Surendra that Harsh had the potential to go a long way. And because the regular job transfers would have hampered that, Surendra took early retirement.

Two years later, when Surendra had to move to the nearby Mauda, Harsh's mother, Jyoti, left her teaching career in between to support him too.

"My mom used to come back from school, take me to the academy, then pick me up, and then do the house chores too. Even my father used to do the night shift and take me to matches in the morning," Harsh said.

He was quick to repose their sacrifices in age-group cricket. His bowling took over as his primary skill and the Col. CK Nayudu Trophy and the Cooch Behar Trophy became his dens. In 2019, he was rewarded with a selection for a U-19 series involving two Indian teams, and one each from South Africa and Afghanistan.

Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ravi Bishnoi, Marco Jansen, Tilak Varma, Dhruv Jurel, and Sameer Rizvi, among others, Harsh shone as the joint-second-highest wicket-taker in the Quadrangular. A call-up for the ensuing Under-19 World Cup in South Africa seemed obvious but he was overlooked.

He could have sulked like some hundred aspiring young cricketers in his situation might choose to do too. But Harsh was Surendra and Jyoti's son. Confident that his skills weren't the issue, he used the time to work on his fitness.

"I used to eat whatever I liked, nothing calculated, eat whatever was given to me, a lot of sweets too," Harsh said. "And my metabolism is also comparatively a little slow, so my body would easily retain fat. At 16 also I was very healthy but after I played Under-19 India... I thought, 'Now, for one year I will only focus on fitness because I do have the skills.' After that, I started to focus on fitness and right now I am much better than what it was during that time."

The results were for everyone to see. In the 2021-22 Col. CK Nayudu Trophy, he was the highest wicket-taker with a whopping 45 wickets in six matches at an average of 18.71. 11 of those wickets came in the final against Mumbai where he bowled 72 overs in two innings. But even those were rookie numbers for him.

"I will tell you about this one match we had with Karnataka," he said. "It was a very flat wicket, so my team bowled somewhere about 171 overs total in one innings, and I personally bowled 66 out of those! That has been my best till now, But you know, this shouldn’t be needed (laughs)"

With the 45 wickets came 258 crucial lower-order runs too at an average of 32.35.

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Ravichandran Ashwin's under-study

Talent, fate, and hard work are nothing without consistency. In India, you need to do the little things right - sleep on time, eat right, relentlessly keep yourself away from distractions - over and over again to make sure you keep ticking on the stats. This is until you reach the stage where you make your own luck by standing out.

But when your tangibles are like the Vidarbha 21-year-old — simplistic rhythmic bowling action, no flashy variations but a reliance on subtly different seam positions, pace, angles, release points, and palm positions with maximum focus on trying to land the ball on the same spot — you need the right eyes to stand-out in.

Harsh found the best pair in India in the 2022 winter: Ravichandran Ashwin.

The India legend, as he does, was scheduled to feature for the Mylapore Recreation Club - 'A' in a Tamil Nadu first-division competition, the Chennai League. But when he got selected for the Asia Cup, he asked Rajasthan Royals (RR) net bowler Rajneesh Gurbani, Harsh's teammate at Vidarbha, to suggest replacements. And Gurbani gave Harsh's name alongside a few others.

"Ashwin searched for my videos on Youtube and then he told Gurbani, 'Ask this guy if he would come to play'," Harsh recalled. "Then bhaiya called me and asked if I wanted to play in the tournament. That was the time when our under-25 was going on, so I was playing there, and I said yes I will play."

And he didn't just play. Despite joining MRCA only for the second half of the tournament, just a week after the Col. CK Nayudu Trophy final, he started with a five-wicket haul and picked up 26 wickets in eight games to jump to the top half of the wicket-takers list, thrusting MRCA to the final with him.

His form was so good that even when Ashwin returned to play the final, he didn't have any bowling advice to offer. So, Harsh picked his batting brain.

"He said you have all the shots, but that doesn’t mean you have to pull out all the shots at once. In the semi-final, I got out after making some 14-15 runs, that is when he told me that. Then I used his advice in the final, and I scored somewhere around 120 runs and on top of that I also took 4 wickets (to end as the second-highest wicket-taker)."

Although Harsh grew up idolizing Yuvraj Singh and now tries to replicate Ravindra Jadeja's all-roundedness, who can be better than Ashwin, who wanted to start as a batter too and still carries that passion in his intent, to help him?

"Even now, whenever I need him for anything in life or something about bowling, I do call him," Harsh said. "He was the one who talked to SG for my bating and pads contract... When you are not able to understand something in life or are wondering what more you can do to get better, it's better to talk to someone who has so much knowledge."

See how he speaks about using white-ball skills in red-ball, and you'll know why they are the perfect match.

"The white ball, I'll tell you from a bowler's perspective, doesn't drop much because it's lighter," he said. "The red ball is heavier. If you give the red ball more revolutions, it drops a bit, and grips a bit in the wicket but that doesn't happen in white-ball cricket... It's comparatively difficult [to deceive the batter in flight] because the Kookaburra ball doesn't offer a lot of help unless there's something in the wicket. If you try something in white-ball cricket that you do with the red-ball, a lot of times it falls just under the bat."

Another 165 against Mumbai followed by 13 wickets and a match-winning six versus Madhya Pradesh in the next edition of the Col. CK Nayudu Trophy finally made Vidarbha realise that he was too good for the level.

Snatched away in the middle of the tournament from the junior Vidarbha team, he was soon traveling back home to Nagpur to play the Ranji Trophy.

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Epitomizing Vidarbha

Vidarbha have not only been the under-dogs of the Indian domestic circuit for a long time but also within the home state Maharashtra, where two teams - named after the state and the capital city have been much more dominant across formats.

Before the 2010s, the region had a rich red-ball culture and a sense of community to show off but not an identity. But the arrival of coaches from Mumbai, the imbuing of the 'khadoos' attitude, and Chandrakant Pandit's "think about cricket 24x7" style with rigorous mixed camps of teens, men, and women brought tectonic shifts.

All culminated in a come-from-behind win against Karnataka in the 2017-18 final to win their first-ever title followed by a superb defence next year against Saurashtra. Now, Vidarbha epitomizes fight and stubbornness with a youth-led flair. And Harsh represented that to perfection in the 2024 final against Mumbai.

Vidarbha had destroyed teams to reach the summit clash and Harsh had only played a small part in four games. Picked ahead of Akshay Wakhare in the final despite not playing the semi-final, he took out Prithvi Shaw, Musheer Khan, and Ajinkya Rahane in his first spell, bamboozling them with his turn on Day 1.

Later, in a post-match presentation, he spoke about how he likes to pre-plan the wickets of the best batters in the opposition team.

"That mentality has always been there," Harsh said regarding it. "Against Saurashtra, I told myself I'll definitely get Cheteshwar Pujara out somehow. He got out in the first innings against our pacers before I even came to bowl because the wicket was pacer-friendly. In the second innings, I had thought I had to definitely get him out. That came to my mind somehow and I did get him out. Even in the final, I thought I had to get one of Shaw, Iyer, or Rahane out."

Mumbai escaped the collapse and concluded with 224 before bowling Vidarbha out for just 105, their only such showing with the bat in the entire season.

In the second essay, they piled up 418 runs thanks to Musheer's 136. A back injury to Vidarbha's lead spinner Aditya Sarwate while doing warm-ups on the second morning of the Test helped their cause massively too.

Harsh stepped up with a marathon 48 overs to claim his first five-wicket haul in first-class cricket, made even special because his family was in attendance, but he couldn't prevent Rahane's team from setting them an impossible 538-run target. That's when Vidarbha's acquired penchant for not giving up came to the fore.

"We were all very positive because we didn't have anything to lose," Harsh said. "That way, even if we had got all out at 100 in the process, it wouldn't have made a big difference, but were we to make a match out of it, it would have been something extraordinary."

The team set itself a target of 270/3 but Karun Nair's wicket after a brilliant 74 (220) just minutes before Stumps followed by a dodgy call that dislodged Yash Thakur before that left them reeling at 223/5.

There began a vigil - 130 runs between skipper Akshay Wadkar and Harsh where the former scored a magnificent, busy century and the latter chipped in with a stroke-filled 65 (128). The ball was turning square, staying low often, and sometimes even bouncing too much but nothing seemed to faze them.

"My plan was to reach the pitch of the ball and cover the line," Harsh explained. "What we noticed, even when I was bowling, was that the ball was turning a lot from outside the stumps. But if you played with a big stride from near the stumps, which Musheer did against me, it wasn't that difficult. When you bowl, you understand how to bat on the wicket too. Even in the second innings, when Ajinkya Rahane got out to me, it was because his stride wasn't that big."

As they batted through Lunch, their manipulation of spin and the sharp running set drew social media comparisons with that VVS Laxman-Rahul Dravid partnership on the same date in 2001, when Harsh wasn't even born.

And the frustration was clear among the Mumbai players who had legends like Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar and Diana Edulji waiting in attendance since the previous day to commemorate a massive win.

"Dhawal Kulkarni ji came to me and started sledging in the evening itself," Harsh said with a smile. "And 100% we wanted to do that (frustrate them). We didn't want to give away the match easily... The best thing for us was that they had called up dhol (a large drum) on the fourth day itself. They were ready to bang them thinking they'll win on the fourth day. But we didn't let them do that. Even on the fifth day they were thinking they'll be able to bang them in the morning but we didn't want to give it to them easily."

But Mumbai knew, the dhol-bangers knew, Wadkar knew and Harsh did too - it was only a matter of one ball. Another hard-grinder, Tanush Kotian got that through in the 130th over to get Wadkar trapped in front. Harsh got bounced out by Tushar Deshpande the next over and Vidarbha crumbled to 368 in the 135th.

"We just wanted to try, at least and not get all-out for 50 or 100 runs," Harsh said. "At least they should know that Vidarbha is playing the match because the first-day was a really poor show. Even after the match ended, Sunil Gavaskar ji came to us and said the way you guys played in the fourth innings was tremendous... Even he said that he thought the match would end on the fourth day but the way you stretched the match was a big thing, especially against Mumbai."

Even Tendulkar posted on X complimenting Nair, Wadkar, and Harsh's resilience with the bat which was almost like completing a full circle for the youngster. The oldest post on the youngster's Instagram is a photo with Tendulkar from 2016. when Surendra, stationed at the airport in Nagpur, called his son for a meet-up.

"The ‘God’ took my name, that is a very huge thing," Harsh exclaimed.

Harsh is a big match player and he knows it. He attributes it to his calm outlook and the mindset of seeing it as an opportunity to impress because such matches garner the most attention instead of taking pressure.

But even still, bowling 68 overs and then batting for over 22 more, isn't an easy job for a 21-year-old. Some aspiring cricketers happily choose to give up one skill to give complete attention to the other at this stage. Does he think about it too?

"No, I want to become an all-rounder only because without that, you can’t play India," Harsh said, determinedly. "If you aim to take the place of a big player like Ravindra Jadeja in the team, then you have to be the very best in all three things. Only then you will have a chance to play for India."

But at the heart of it is something so pure that it's difficult to find anywhere else.

"I just love Test cricket," Harsh said. "In Vidarbha, most domestic cricket is red-ball. We even used to play One-Days with the red ball. I don't know, I just have this love for red-ball cricket from childhood. One-Day and T20 -- yes, I certainly have to do well there and that's different. When it comes to red-ball, I just love it since forever... You won't get this answer from other people of my age. I just want to represent India in Test matches."