Deodhar Trophy History: Format, Winners & Role in Indian Cricket

On 3 August 2023, at the Cricket Association of Puducherry's ground, South Zone beat East Zone by 45 runs to win the Deodhar Trophy for the ninth time. Rohan Kunnummal made 107 from 75 balls, Washington Sundar took three wickets, and the trophy went south. It was the fiftieth year of the competition and, as it turned out, the last. The Deodhar Trophy has not been played since.

Nobody announced its abolition. There was no press conference and no statement of principle. The competition had already spent three years unplayed during the pandemic and its aftermath, was brought back for one edition in 2023, and then simply did not appear on the next season's schedule. That is how most domestic cricket competitions die: not by decision but by omission from a calendar that has run out of room.

This page sets out what the Deodhar Trophy was, how its format was reworked three times in a decade, who won it, and the honest reasons it stopped — which are more about the growth of a rival competition than about anything wrong with this one.

The man, and the first fifty years

The trophy is named for Dinkar Balwant Deodhar, a Maharashtra batter of the pre-independence era who was widely called the Grand Old Man of Indian cricket, lived past a hundred, and was still being consulted on the game decades after his playing career ended. Naming a one-day competition after him was a slightly incongruous gesture — he belonged to an era of three-day matches on matting — and it stuck.

The competition began in the 1973-74 season as India's inter-zonal 50-over tournament, and for four decades it was exactly that: North, South, East, West and Central Zone, with the same regional groupings that contest the Duleep Trophy, playing limited-overs cricket instead of first-class. Two zones met in a quarter-final and the winner joined the other three in the semi-finals, which is an unusual structure and a sensible one for five teams and a short window.

It was the white-ball half of a matched pair. Indian domestic cricket in the 1970s and 1980s was built on two axes — state competitions and zonal competitions — and the board ran a first-class and a limited-overs tournament on each. The Ranji and Duleep trophies covered the long game; the Deodhar Trophy and, later, the Vijay Hazare Trophy covered fifty overs.

Three formats in three years

From 2015-16 the board stopped believing in the zonal version and began experimenting, in a sequence that mirrors what it was doing to the Duleep Trophy at the same time.

The first experiment, from 2015-16, pitted the winners of the Vijay Hazare Trophy against India A and India B — a three-team round robin in which the best state side in the country's 50-over competition took on two selected national squads. The idea had a clear logic: the board wanted to see its fringe internationals against the strongest domestic unit available, and the zones were no longer the strongest units.

The second, from 2018-19, dropped the state champions altogether and ran India A, India B and India C in a round robin with the top two contesting a final. At that point the competition had stopped being a domestic tournament in any meaningful sense. It was a selection trial with a trophy attached, closer in function to the India A programme than to anything a state cricketer could aspire to win.

The third change was a reversal. The competition was not held from 2020 through 2022, and when it returned in 2023 it returned in its original form: zonal sides, quarter-final, semi-finals, final. South Zone won it. Then it stopped.

The honours

Team	Approximate titles
North Zone	Around 13
South Zone	9
West Zone	Several
Central Zone	Several
East Zone	Fewest of the five zones
India A / B / C sides	The four editions between 2015-16 and 2019-20

North Zone's dominance is the standout figure and it has a straightforward explanation: for most of the competition's life, North Zone could pick from Delhi, Punjab and Haryana, and Delhi alone supplied a steady stream of international batters. South Zone's nine, including the last, reflect Karnataka and Tamil Nadu doing the same thing a decade later.

The exact counts differ slightly between sources, which is why they are given as approximations here. Several editions of the competition are recorded inconsistently, a handful were shortened by weather, and the four seasons contested by India A, B and C sit awkwardly in any honours list because the teams were not continuing entities.

Why it stopped

Three developments killed the Deodhar Trophy, and only one of them was about the competition itself.

The first and largest is the growth of the Vijay Hazare Trophy. When the Deodhar Trophy began, India had no national 50-over competition for its states; the Vijay Hazare Trophy did not exist until 1993-94 and took years to acquire its current scale. It now runs across all thirty-eight state teams in Elite and Plate divisions and occupies four weeks of the season. Once that existed, an inter-zonal 50-over tournament answered a question nobody was still asking.

The second is calendar pressure. The Indian domestic season has to fit a two-phase first-class championship, two national white-ball tournaments, a full women's programme and an age-group ladder into roughly eight months around the monsoon and the IPL. Every window is contested. A competition that duplicated the format of a bigger one was the obvious candidate to lose its slot.

The third is the redundancy of zonal white-ball cricket as a selection tool. A selector wanting to see a fringe 50-over player now has the A-team programme, the Vijay Hazare Trophy and a great deal of televised T20 cricket. The panel described in the page on how India's selectors work did not need a fourth window, and the board's own experiments with India A, B and C sides in this competition were an admission that the zonal structure had stopped generating useful information.

What was lost

It would be easy to write this off as tidy-minded administration, and mostly it was. But two things genuinely disappeared with the Deodhar Trophy and neither has been replaced.

The first is a route for a good limited-overs player from a weak state. A batter at Tripura or Meghalaya can have a strong Vijay Hazare campaign in the Plate division and be watched by almost nobody. Zonal selection put him in a side with international players and against them, which was the whole argument for zonal cricket in the first place — the same argument that keeps the Irani Cup alive.

The second is 50-over cricket itself. Indian domestic cricket now runs one national 50-over competition against a first-class championship split into two phases and a T20 tournament, plus the IPL. The format's share of the domestic calendar has fallen while India continues to play a great deal of international one-day cricket, and the history of India's ODI side is not obviously well served by that. Coaches have made this point publicly; the board's answer is that the arithmetic does not permit more.

Whether it comes back

Indian domestic competitions have a habit of returning. The Deodhar Trophy itself came back in 2023 after three years away, and the Duleep Trophy has been abolished in substance and revived more than once. The board's stated position has been that the domestic calendar is under review each season, which is neither a commitment nor a refusal.

If it does return, the likeliest shape is not the old one. The gap in the system is not inter-zonal 50-over cricket; it is a bridge for good white-ball players outside the Elite division, and a competition designed for that would look different from the one South Zone won at Puducherry. The rest of the domestic architecture is set out across the cricket in India hub and in the page on how the BCCI is structured.

Sources and method

Match results, dates and scorecards come from ESPNcricinfo series records, including the 2023 final at Puducherry. Format changes and tournament status follow BCCI domestic season announcements and contemporaneous reporting of the competition's return in 2023 and its absence from subsequent schedules.

Title counts are given as approximations because published honours lists for this competition differ, several early editions are recorded inconsistently, and the four seasons contested by selected India sides rather than zones do not fit a by-team ledger. No total is asserted here that a single source does not support. The account of why the competition stopped is an interpretation of scheduling decisions the board has not explained in a formal statement; it draws on the published calendars and on positions administrators and coaches have taken publicly, and it should be read as an argument rather than a finding. Details current as of 27 August 2026.