Preview: The Challenger Trophy

The writer woke up today, still with the hangover from the Champions League T20 final of the previous night. He was relieved thinking that he would be able to find some peace from the game until later this week when India takes on England in their home series. Quite obviously and to his surprise, the aforementioned emotion was ephemeral.

While going through the morning newspapers, he happened to come across an article that said, “India Blue takes on India Red”. No, it wasn’t any advertisement (which the writer thought), but to his amazement, another, short but important, series was waiting for him before it leads to the India-England ODI series – “The Challenger Trophy”.

Rahul Dravid, Winner, The Challenger Trophy(2005)

A novel concept and like its previous editions, this time too it includes three teams : India Blue to be led by Subramaniam Badrinath, India Red to be led by Gautam Gambhir and India Green to be led by Harbhajan Singh, who recently was at the helm of the proceedings for MI(Mumbai Indians) when they completed their first championship victory last night.

Over the years, the Challenger trophy has brought certain players into the limelight straightaway on a consistent basis. Whether these players capitalized on their opportunities or not is a different issue(we are not going there over here). Who can forget the ‘googly’ bowled to Sachin by Piyush Chawla when the maestro himself recommended him for a place in the national side? Robin Uthappa, Sreesanth and Venugopal Rao are amongst others who hopped into the Indian dressing room, courtesy, this very event.

Another important feature of this kind of competition is that there are no foreign participants, and thus all the focus would be solely on the local lads. Therefore, there would be no Chris Gayle who will single-handedly put his team on the finals. Neither would there be any James Franklin who will win the semi final and final for his team with both his bowling and batting efforts respectively. This would be a show conceptualized and implemented by the Indian players all the way.

With some prominent names in the line-ups of each of these three teams, it’s time for the established names to live up to their reputations, the ignored names to present their case to the National Selectors and come back into reckoning but, most importantly, for the younger or the comparatively less known brigade, especially when the national team is undergoing a transitional phase (bowlers, are you listening?), to raise their hands up by performing and let the country take notice of them.

So, all readers, make some way for the curtain raiser of ‘The Challenger Trophy’, hoping to discover useful talents. Let the show begin!