The Ranji Trophy is set to return in a curtailed form on February 16 with 38 participating teams divided into nine groups. Each team will be assured of a minimum of three games, as opposed to eight during the tournament’s last edition in 2019-20.
The Hindu understands that the decision was taken during the BCCI hierarchy’s meeting in Ahmedabad on Monday.
No Plate team will feature in the knockout stage for the first time since the tournament’s expansion from 28 to 37 (later 38) teams in 2018-19.
The top 32 teams will be divided into eight groups of four teams each while the Plate group will be a six-team affair. Nine venues that are set to host a group each are Chennai, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru, Rajkot, Cuttack, Guwahati, Kolkata, and Hyderabad.
As a result, the three preliminary rounds will be scheduled from February 16 to 19, February 23 to 26 and March 2 to 5.
The teams will have to serve three days’ quarantine and will get two days’ official training window before the tournament opener.
Tamil Nadu — clubbed along with Jharkhand, Delhi and Chhatisgarh — will play its group games at Ahmedabad and Chennai will host the group consisting of Railways, Jammu and Kashmir, and Pondicherry.
The format is drastically different than the one originally announced by the BCCI. In the earlier format, scheduled to begin on January 13 before it was postponed due to COVID-19 surge, each team was assured five league games.
