By Admin 
When the Ranji Trophy schedule for the 2025-26 season was announced, there was optimism in the Tamil Nadu camp. The team had four of its seven league fixtures at home and decided to play all four at Coimbatore, which had become a fortress in the last two years. Playing against some of the group’s challenging outfits in its backyard should have given TN a distinct advantage.
Instead, three matches into the campaign, TN’s hopes of qualification are already hanging by a thread. Worryingly, it lost by an innings to Jharkhand and scraped to a draw against defending champion Vidarbha, garnering a solitary point in the two home contests.
A major issue that resurfaced was the batters’ technical competence while handling seam bowling. The players have struggled when there has been seam or swing assistance for the medium-pacers.
This year, however, the trend of batters getting bowled to seemingly innocuous deliveries on the stump line points to a deeper malaise. Out of the 39 dismissals, frontline batters have been castled 13 times.
The TN seamers, too, have looked listless and lacked discipline. Both these problems trace back to the spin-friendly pitches on offer in the TNCA first-division league.
“In league matches, the seamers bowl just a few overs on surfaces which are spin-friendly. If you don’t bowl more overs, you can’t get the rhythm of bowling the right lengths and suddenly expect them to do it here,” said TN head coach Senthilnathan.
“The opponents’ pacers were consistently operating in the channel outside the off-stump or targeting the stumps at the right lengths, which we were not able to do. When Trilok Nag bowled in the right area in one spell, he got three wickets, but couldn’t do it consistently,” he added.
With just four points in its kitty, TN has almost been pushed into a situation where it has to win the remaining four games outright to give itself any chance of progressing beyond the group stage.