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Meet the 19-year-old legspinner rewriting the Ranji record books

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The first thing you notice is the run-up. It is short, almost apologetic, and it ends with a pause that seems to last a fraction too long. Then the ball arrives, and the batter discovers that the pause was the point.

Nineteen-year-old Ravi Deshmukh has taken 23 wickets in his first three first-class matches for Maharashtra, including a 7 for 41 against Gujarat that made the national selectors reach for their notebooks.

His coach is trying to keep the noise down. “He is a kid,” he says. “Let him be a kid. The wickets are nice. The important thing is that he learns what to do when the wickets stop coming.”

For now, the wickets are not stopping.

Asia Cup 2026: The five moments that defined the tournament

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Asia Cup 2026 was not short of theatre. It was also not short of rain, but between the interruptions there was a tournament that reminded everyone how good the format can be.

First, the last-ball six in Karachi that turned a dead match into a classic. Then the run-out at the Premadasa that still looks impossible. There was the 5-3-4-4 spell at the death, the opening partnership that broke a 27-year-old record, and the catch on the boundary that an umpire initially ruled a six.

The final, when it arrived, was almost anticlimactic. Almost.

Why the DRS ‘umpire’s call’ debate is back — and what could change

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The phrase itself is the problem. “Umpire’s call” sounds like a deference, a polite refusal to overrule a colleague. In practice it is a statistical threshold, applied by a ball-tracking model that nobody in the crowd can see.

The result is that identical deliveries can produce different outcomes depending on whether the batter is given out or not out on the field. The technology is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The language is letting it down.

A modest proposal: tell the crowd the number. Show the percentage of the ball that is hitting the stumps. Let people argue about the threshold instead of the moon phase.

It will not end the debate. It might make it more honest.

From the archive: When Wankhede witnessed Tendulkar’s final bow

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The Wankhede has changed since 2013. There are new stands, new screens, a new press box. The pitch still sits in the same place, and on quiet afternoons you can still find the spot where Sachin Tendulkar bent down and touched the surface.

The day itself was not a great cricket match. It was something else: a collective farewell, staged in the one ground that had watched him grow up.

“I have seen the crowd do many things,” said a steward who has worked at the ground for thirty years. “That day, they did not want to leave. They just stood there.”

This is the Wankhede that Rohit Sharma plays for now. The ground remembers.

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