Plucky 13

Martin Chandler | 9:17am GMT 25 January 2026

Published: 2025
Pages: 197
Author: Ezekiel, Gulu and Bajaj, Sachin (Editors)
Publisher: Global Cricket School
Rating: 3.5 stars

I have read many books about the County Championship, either general histories or the stories of particular campaigns or series of campaigns. What I haven’t read though is anything about the First Class domestic structures of other countries. There are one or two on my shelves waiting to be read about aspects of the Sheffield Shield, but those Australian titles aside I don’t recall seeing and such books from the Test playing countries.

That said I do now have one from India which supplements my scant knowledge of the major Indian First Class competition, the Ranji Trophy. That knowledge is pretty much limited to the date the competition started, the fact that it was named after Ranjitsinhji and that when, as a child and young adult I looked briefly at the Cricket in India section of Wisden and the list of winners, it seemed to be a competition that for many years was monopolised by Bombay (Mumbai).

And there was just a single Ranji Trophy match that I knew about, from way back in 1944/45, and perhaps unsurprisingly that one gets mentioned twice here. It was the final of that year’s competition and won, almost inevitably, by Bombay by the huge margin of 374 runs. The memory comes from what was, by all accounts, a mesmeric performance from Denis Compton in Holkar’s failed run chase, when the great English batsman was left unbeaten on 249 when the last wicket fell.

But I know a good deal more about the Ranji Trophy after reading Plucky 13. The book is not a history of the competition. Perhaps that will come one day, but for now the 13 represent the thirteen teams that have won the trophy more than once. Each of them is the subject of an essay by a different writer and the collection is then edited by Gulu Ezekiel and Sachin Bajaj.

The formula works well. Had a single writer been responsible for the whole book it is easy to imagine that the chapters would have become formulaic. As it is different writers approach their not dissimilar tasks in different ways. The most difficult was surely that of Hemant Kenkre, who had to do justice to the 42 winning teams that Bombay/Mumbai have produced. No one else had to deal with more than eight (Anand Vasu on Karnataka) and Gulu himself wisely chose Maharashtra whose name appears on the trophy just twice, thereby affording himself and co-writer Kirti Patil more opportunity for story telling rather than simply recording history.

All of the chapters are of interest. There are men featured about whom I had no prior knowledge before opening the book, and whilst I did of course know a good deal about the many great cricketers who have appeared in the Ranji Trophy their particular deeds as set out here were not familiar to me. The book also has, as anything in which Gulu is involved has, a well curated selection of interesting photographs.

One aspect of the book which I suspect was probably just an afterthought for the editors, but which I greatly enjoyed was the appearance at the end of each essay of its writer’s selection of an all time eleven from his team. It was therefore a source of slight disappointment that Raju Mukherji, who contributes the chapter on Bengal, chose not to do that so I thought, based on his chapter, I would have a try myself, and this what I came up with:-

Pankaj Roy

Gopal Bose

Sourav Ganguly

Arun Lal

Ambar Roy

Shyam Sundar Mitra

Wriddhiman Saha

Subhash Gupte

Mohammad Shami

Saradindu Mukherjee

Dilip Doshi

Twelfth Man: Chuni Goswami

And then I realised that there are big names in Indian cricket who don’t make an appearance at all. So I had a quick look at the sides who have won the trophy just once to see if I could construct a side from them, and I think I have one to challenge any of the other teams. It is led by Kapil Dev and includes, also from Haryana, Ajay Jadeja, Chetan Sharma and Amarjeet Kaypee. Gujarat contribute Ravindra Jadeja, Parthiv Patel and RP Singh. There are two Punjabis, Navjot Sidhu and Gursharan Singh, and from Uttar Pradesh Suresh Raina and Piyush Chawla and, to make up the twelve, Rajat Patidar from Madhya Pradesh.

And then there are the sides who have never won the trophy. What squad could be carved out of the teams that have represented them down the years? Sadly I lack the knowledge to carry out that exercise, but I suspect that some of my Indian friends would find it an enjoyable diversion. If they do I hope they will share their thoughts with me.

Which brings me back to the task in hand, reviewing Plucky 13. By its nature it will appeal primarily to those who follow the Ranji Trophy, but if that is, proportionately, anything like as many as follow the County Championship in England it will sell well, and its buyers will not be disappointed.