Four Duleep Trophy squads are in, and the quarter-finals run into India’s Colombo Test

South Zone have made Tilak Varma their captain again for the 2026-27 Duleep Trophy, with Andhra’s Ricky Bhui as his deputy, and that leaves North Zone and North East Zone as the only two of the six teams still to name a side. The tournament opens India’s domestic red-ball season on 23 August at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru and runs through to 10 September, every match on the two grounds there.

Four squads are in. West Zone were first, back on 21 July, with Ruturaj Gaikwad in charge and Shams Mulani as vice-captain. Central Zone, the holders, kept Rajat Patidar and handed Rinku Singh the deputy’s job on 1 August. East Zone went with Ishan Kishan and made Vaibhav Sooryavanshi vice-captain at 15. South followed this weekend.

The quarter-finals and the Colombo Test are the same four days

The awkward part of the calendar is right at the front. Both quarter-finals are scheduled for 23 to 26 August, East against North East on Ground 2 and North against West on Ground 1, each starting at 9.30am IST. India’s second Test against Sri Lanka is at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo from 23 to 27 August. The first ball of the domestic season and the first ball of that Test land on the same morning.

India named a 15-man squad for the two Tests, and the effect on the zonal sides is visible in who is not in them. West have Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ravindra Jadeja and Jasprit Bumrah in their catchment and none of the three is in the squad Gaikwad will lead. South have no KL Rahul, no Sai Sudharsan, no Mohammed Siraj, no Prasidh Krishna, no Devdutt Padikkal. North Zone, captained last season by Shubman Gill, have not published a squad at all yet, and they are one of the four teams with a quarter-final to play in that window.

Saransh Jain is picked in both

One name appears on two team sheets. Saransh Jain is in Central Zone’s squad and he is also in India’s Test squad for Sri Lanka, a maiden call-up at 33 after a long domestic career. He earned it here: he took eight wickets in last season’s Duleep Trophy final and was named player of the tournament.

Central can probably live with it. As holders they have a bye straight to the semi-finals, which begin on 30 August, three days after the Colombo Test is due to finish. South Zone have the other bye. So the two seeded teams do not have to field anyone until well after India’s tour is over, while the two quarter-finals are played by the four zones with the least protection.

Prithvi Shaw is back in a zonal side

The most interesting selection in the four squads named so far is Prithvi Shaw, who is in Gaikwad’s West Zone group. Shaw moved to Maharashtra after leaving Mumbai and spent the 2025-26 Ranji Trophy making the case that he had not gone anywhere as a batter. The innings people remember is 222 from 156 balls against Chandigarh at the Sector 16 Stadium, with 29 fours and five sixes, his double hundred arriving in 141 deliveries. Only two faster double centuries exist in Ranji Trophy history.

West also carry Shardul Thakur, Sarfaraz Khan, Musheer Khan and Tanush Kotian, six Mumbai players in all, which makes the quarter-final against a North side yet to be announced the more watchable of the two opening ties on paper.

Why the seeding looks the way it does

Central and South are through to the semi-finals because they met in last season’s final. Central won it by six wickets in Bengaluru in September 2025, chasing 65 on a fifth-day surface that was misbehaving enough to cost them four wickets in the process. Patidar made 101 in the first innings, Yash Rathod 194, and the spin pair of Saransh Jain and Kumar Kartikeya took 16 wickets between them in the match. It was Central’s first Duleep Trophy since 2014.

Central will play whichever of East or North East survives the first quarter-final; South meet the winner of North against West. The semi-finals run from 30 August to 2 September and the final, five days rather than four, is at Ground 1 from 6 to 10 September.

For most of the players named so far, this is the first time the selectors see them this season. For the fifteen who will be in Galle and Colombo, it is a tournament happening without them.

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