Cricket grounds will be buzzing from August 28: the longest domestic season will kick off

Delhi: Amidst the discussion of international cricket, the BCCI announced the program of 2025-26 domestic cricket season in India. Prior to the discussion of the match program in the season, there is a congratulations for the BCCI that the schedule of the matches has been declared about two and a half months before the first match of the season.

The record is also that the entire schedule was declared only a few days before the match started. This time the season will start with playing the Dalip Trophy from 28 August 2025 and will end on 3 April 2026 with the Senior Women’s Inter-Zonal Multi-Day Trophy. This is not only the longest, most official match in the world.

Duleep Trophy:

Will play it from August 28. This trophy is returning to the zonal format. In the last season, four teams, India A, B, C and D had participated in the Dalip Trophy which they were choosing the BCCI selector so that they could see the right players playing for the future from their perspective. In this way, the top players of the country played with each other in the round-robin.

This time the return of the zonal format will increase the team’s count to 6 (North, South, East, West, Central and North-East). Each zonal team will choose the zonal selection committee, just like 2023-24 seasons. The current thinking of the BCCI on the change in this form is that this will improve the level of cricket and the players will feel proud to play for their zone team. It was felt that players playing for India A or similar team and other team are playing just to improve their records without any emotional connection with the team.

Iranian Cup: will run from 1 to 5 October

Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy: The nature of this tournament playing from 26 November to 8 December will change. The Super League round will begin after the group round. In the first round, 8 groups of 32 teams, two top teams from each group in the super league where 3 matches of each team and the top 2 teams will reach the final.

Vijay Hazare Trophy:

Plate division started from this time in this tournament from 24 December to 8 January. The 6 lowest team of the 2024-25 season will play in the plate division. Earlier 8 teams had three groups and 7 teams. Now 4 elite and 1 plate group will play the match together. In these groups, the team will come on the basis of performance (achieved point, win and net run rate) in these groups. From the next season, the team, which is at the bottom of these groups, will come in the plate group of the limited over tournament.

Male Under-23 State Trophy:

This time the plate division starts. The 6 lowest team of the 2024-25 season will play in the plate division. The format with Vijay Hazare Trophy will remain in force.

Ranji Trophy:

Like 2024-25, will play in two rounds and will play the white ball cricket tournament (Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and Vijay Hazare Trophy) between the two rounds. This will especially remove the fear of stopping the match due to weather in North and East. The first round will run from 15 October to 19 November, while the second will start from January 22. Groups are made like this:

Elite A: Tamil Nadu, Baroda, Jharkhand, Odisha, UP, Andhra, Nagaland
Elite B: Saurashtra, Chandigarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, MP, Punjab, Goa
Elite C: Gujarat, Haryana, Services, Bengal, Railways, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Assam
Elite D: Mumbai, J&K, HP, Delhi, Hyderabad, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Puducherry
Plate: Meghalaya, Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur, Arunachal

New special changes:

1. The Dalip Trophy will now be played between the 6 zonal team selected by the zonal selectors.
2. For all white ball tournaments, the head-to-head clause has been changed. Now the net run rate will decide which team will move forward if the points are equal.
3. Plate division resumed in Vijay Hazare Trophy, Senior Women’s One-Day Trophy and men’s Under-23 State Trophy. This will see better cricket in the tournament, but also such matches will stop in which there is no match in the mutual level of the team.
4. In the Ranji Trophy, now only one team will go from the plate group to the elite group, and a team will go down.

Related news