At 2.11pm on the fifth and final day, under cloudy Chennai skies, the Duleep Trophy final, which had meandered for so long, culminated in a draw. The result started to look like a foregone conclusion right after East Zone had posted 708, on the back of their captain Ishan Kishan's 270 off 334 balls, on a flat Chepauk pitch that remained flat across five days.
After dismissing South Zone for 366 and earning a monster first-innings lead, which was enough to win the title, East batted on in their second innings until they declared around 30 minutes before tea on the final day. Both captains, Kishan and Tilak Varma, got together and shook hands, signalling they had had enough and the Duleep Trophy was all over.
What started as a fun match, with Vaibhav Sooryavanshi drawing substantial crowds on Sunday morning, soon turned into a mismatch.
In group-stage games in the Ranji Trophy, India's premier red-ball domestic competition, additional points are awarded to the side leading on first innings if the second innings can't be completed. However, in knockout games, including the Duleep Trophy, the winner is decided by the first-innings lead if the second innings can't be completed. For years, the first-innings lead rule has disincentivised teams from pushing for outright wins and made the game less competitive.
When the rule itself is skewed like this, why would a captain jeopardise his team's chances of winning a trophy?
"Why do you think we will be bowling for three days? Look, we batted for roughly two days, right? Now, as a unit, we know this is essentially a first-innings shootout," Kishan said when asked if he was looking to enforce the follow-on on Monday. "It's a one-innings game. So, our primary task is to take those first ten wickets. After that, as a captain, I'll probably tell them we are batting again! (laughs). Why would I want to step back out in the heat?"
If such situations are to be avoided in future finals, some change is needed. For instance, the first-innings rule shouldn't apply to finals. How about sharing the trophy? It might force captains to think differently.
Another contributing factor to this farcical finish was the selection or non-selection in the South Zone squad. Experienced domestic players like Karun Nair and R Sai Kishore were not picked for the Duleep final and were instead performing elsewhere.
The benign nature of the red-soil Chepauk surface also diluted the contest between bat and ball. Barring the odd ball that kept low or kicked up, there was scant assistance for any sort of bowling.
The Duleep final was originally scheduled to be played at the BCCI's Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru, where there are "certain restrictions regarding crowd attendance," according to the BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia. But the game was later shifted to Chepauk to accommodate fans. Though the Chepauk pitches had seen considerable traffic during the second phase of the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) last month, it's understood that a fresh one was served up for the Duleep final.
East Zone coach Ratan Kumar had no complaints about the pitch.
"It was an excellent batting surface," Ratan said after the end of the game on Thursday. "We can talk about the weather being challenging, but the pitch itself was good. Whoever applied themselves with the bat went on to score big runs. Even with the fast bowling, look at how our pacers went about it. I initially felt there wasn't much assistance for quicks on this track, but they [Mohammed Shami and Mukesh Kumar] are both very experienced bowlers. They stepped up and took four-five wickets for East Zone."
East didn't want to give up a rare opportunity to win the Duleep Trophy. Before Thursday, they had last won it in 2012-13.
They toasted their drought-breaking win and even went on a lap of honour to thank the sparse crowd on Thursday evening. But the finish left everyone with a teasing thought: what might have been had it actually been a match rather than the mismatch it petered out into.