After a five-year gap, one of the oldest cricketing competitions in the country will kick off across four venues in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday. The All India Buchi Babu tournament will feature 12 teams this year and, for the first time, has moved out of Chennai.
The tournament was first played in 1909 in memory of Mothavarapu Venkata Mahipathi Naidu, popularly known as Buchi Babu Naidu (1868-1908).
Buchi Babu played a vital role in taking the game to the masses in Madras. He then decided to conduct a Madras Presidency match in which the best players in the city would take on the Englishmen representing Madras Cricket Club. However, he passed away before the first edition could be held. From 1909, the tournament was named in his honour.
After being played among local clubs for the next few decades, it became an invitational tournament in the 1960s, with the TNCA organising it and teams from outside the State participating in the competition.
Some of the biggest names in Indian cricket used to be part of the tournament, playing for their employers, like the State Bank of India, Associated Cement Companies (ACC), Nirlon and Mafatlal to name a few.
For the next few decades, the tournament, alongside the Moin-ud-Dowla tournament in Hyderabad, became the curtain-raiser for the domestic season in the country.
Usually held in August-September, the tournament was the ideal pre-season warm-up for the players when the monsoon was active in most parts of the country.
But the advent of the TNPL in 2016 meant it was increasingly getting difficult to shoehorn the tournament into an ever-expanding calendar, and it fell off the grid after the 2017 edition.
It has taken Tamil Nadu’s poor record in the Ranji Trophy over the last five years to get the tournament back on the calendar to get its players up and ready for the grind of first-class cricket.
Former India skipper K. Srikkanth recently spoke about how important and prestigious the tournament was during his formative years.
“After the 1971 tour to the West Indies, Sunil Gavaskar came to play Buchi Babu that year for ACC against Jolly Rovers at Loyola College. There were 10,000 people to see who Sunil Gavaskar was. I was a seventh-standard boy and watched him play for the first time,” Srikkanth recalled.
“This was an important tournament for cricketers here. Once you do well in the First Division, you get selected for Buchi Babu, and then if you do well there, you get picked for the under-25 or even Ranji Trophy side.
“It was the biggest non-First Class tournament in India,” he added.
