There could be no more inappropriate time to discuss Indian Test cricket venues than the day before the IPL season starts. I can already hear the response: “Sit down, Aunty, keep quiet”. But before it all goes “RCB, RCB”, let’s at least get the voices of Indian Test cricket faithful out there.
India’s 2026-27 home season, for which fixtures were released Wednesday, will be white-ball heavy, featuring seventeen matches—nine ODIs and eight T20Is—against the West Indies, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe. The BCCI’s cheery media release talked about 22 international matches in 17 cities, a good spread across the country; the other five games are Tests.
The sole Test series at home is for the yummalicious Border-Gavaskar Trophy (BGT) but what was presented sans explanation or logic was the choice of Test venues for this marquee contest. The BGT Tests will be held in Nagpur, Chennai, Guwahati, Ranchi and Ahmedabad. No disrespect to Test cricket fans in Nagpur, Guwahati, Ranchi and Ahmedabad but to ignore four of five cities that make up India’s Test match heartland for this mega series is, well… pick between mindless and petty. Chennai’s Chepauk, fortunately, was spared the ignominy of being overlooked.
‘Chepauk’, ‘Chinnaswamy’, ‘Eden Gardens’, ‘Kotla’ and ‘Wankhede’ are not just words or locations. They are Indian cricket heritage. In their spaces, the spirit of the past cloaks the shoulders of the present as it creates footsteps for the future. The majority of India’s Test-fan base comes from these cities and there are clusters of people who travel to venues to watch at least one Test per series. The Big Five venues always have crowds; sizeable ones for marquee series. But even if not, they have enough to have stands more than half full on the first two-three days or whenever the match is drawing to a finish.
Why then, over the last 10 years, like it is in the season ahead, do the Big Five keep getting treated as if they were only worth Test match chump change? Of the 50 Tests India has played at home in the last 10 years, these five frontline venues have hosted only 18. Five in Chepauk, four each in Eden Gardens and Chinnaswamy, and three each in Kotla and Wankhede. In the last five years, the numbers are: eight out of 22 to the Big Five – two each to Chinnaswamy, Kotla and Wankhede, and one each to Chepauk and Eden Gardens.
After the BGT fixtures, Virat Kohli was quoted as saying that Tests should be distributed “across strong Test centres” like it is elsewhere in the world, “to keep Test cricket alive and exciting.”
Taking Tests to unconventional, smaller, non-mega-metro venues has been interpreted as a red-ball proselyting mission. A great idea, but before trying to sell Test cricket in new territories, you could first strengthen it outside the Big Five at venues where cricket has older roots like Hyderabad and Indore. Indore’s Holkar Stadium hosted its first match, a Test vs New Zealand in 2016 and after that has hosted only two more in the last ten years. Same with Hyderabad, which last hosted a BGT Test in 2013.
The reasoning behind this venue allocation could be one of two things – accidental or deliberate. Organising BCCI fixtures is often said to be a complex calculation for the BCCI, with cities getting left out when trying to cater to approximately 28 international venues.
There is that tricky business called a ‘rotation’ system. But what formula or pattern has Ahmedabad and Guwahati being rotated twice in the same season? They get an ODI and a Test match each in 2026-27, having held eighteen international matches between themselves over the last five years: 13 in Ahmedabad, five in Guwahati. That’s more than three matches a year. Almost double the Big Five’s Test match quota per season.
How about we go down the dangerous road of deliberate? Of a possible reason for cold-shouldering the Big Five out of Tests for over a decade now.
The BCCI has a stipulated hosting fee for associations staging international fixtures. Going by its own declared payments of over ₹25 lakh in the last financial years, every state association hosting a Test receives ₹2.7 crores and ₹1.62 crore for an ODI and T20I. (The subsidy for hosting IPL matches is ₹54 lakh per game). Well, well. Never mind heritage and crowd presence or even taking Test cricket to the hinterlands, is this perhaps the most brazen reason behind the scattershot selection of Test venues?
But even then, surely someone in the BCCI who wields power has noticed that the last India v Australia BGT Test at the Eden Gardens was in fact The BGT Test of Eden Gardens twenty-five years ago? During which time we have played six home BGT series. Please, at least pretend you care.
