The Duleep Trophy starts on Sunday, and two of the six zones are already in the semi-finals

India’s red-ball domestic season opens on Sunday, and a third of the field will not play a ball for another week. The Duleep Trophy begins on 23 August with two quarter-finals at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, both starting at 9.30am IST, while Central Zone and South Zone sit them out and wait in the semi-finals.

Six teams, two quarter-finals

The tournament is a straight knockout, and the reason only four of the six zones are involved this week is last season’s result. Central Zone beat South Zone by six wickets in the 2025-26 final for their seventh title, and the two of them were rewarded with byes. Everyone else has to come through a quarter-final to reach them.

That leaves East Zone against North East Zone on Ground 2 and North Zone against West Zone on Ground 1, both from 23 August. The winner of the first plays Central, the winner of the second plays South, and both semi-finals begin on 30 August.

Shami and a 15-year-old vice-captain in the same East Zone squad

Ishan Kishan captains East Zone, and the squad around him is the most watched of the four in action this week. Mohammed Shami is in it, still working his way back through red-ball cricket, alongside Mukesh Kumar, Shahbaz Ahmed and the long-serving opener Abhimanyu Easwaran. The vice-captain is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who is 15, has eight first-class matches and a first-class average of 17.25 behind him, and whose workload Rahul Dravid spent this week publicly asking everyone to be patient about.

North East Zone are the newest thing in Indian first-class cricket. The zone draws on six states, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim, and only entered the Duleep Trophy in 2022-23. Their first first-class match, against West Zone in September 2022, was a draw. Jonathan Rongsen of Nagaland captains them.

North against West is the harder tie to call

The other quarter-final spreads the recognised names more evenly. Ruturaj Gaikwad leads a West Zone squad with Prithvi Shaw, Shardul Thakur, Musheer Khan and Tanush Kotian in it, and Shams Mulani as vice-captain. North Zone are captained by the Jammu and Kashmir wicketkeeper Kanhaiya Wadhawan, with Ayush Badoni as his deputy and Arshdeep Singh, Yash Dhull, Anshul Kamboj and Abdul Samad in the squad.

For a number of these players the tournament is the first look selectors get before a heavy home season. West Indies arrive in India for three ODIs and five T20Is across September and October, and Australia A come at roughly the same time for two first-class matches and three List A games against India A.

Patidar and Tilak Varma wait, and the final leaves Bengaluru

Central Zone defend the title under Rajat Patidar, with Rinku Singh as vice-captain. South Zone are led by Tilak Varma and have Karun Nair and Shreyas Gopal in the squad. Neither plays until 30 August, which is either a fortnight of useful rest or a fortnight of rust, depending on which captain you ask.

The final starts on 6 September, and it will not be at the Centre of Excellence with the rest of the tournament. The BCCI moved it to the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai so that people can actually come and watch it, the CoE being a training campus rather than a ground built for crowds.

One more thing about Sunday. India’s second Test against Sri Lanka in Colombo starts the same morning, so Indian cricket opens its domestic season and plays for a series win abroad on the same day.

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