Father's Tears Of Joy And A Dream Fulfilled: Harsh Dubey’s Record-Breaking Journey To Ranji Glory

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Last Updated:March 16, 2025, 10:34 IST

Harsh Dubey got his record-breaking 69th wicket vs Kerala in the 2025 Ranji Trophy final with an injured finger. He continued bowling despite the discomfort, not for the record, but because he 'didn't want to lose another final'.

Harsh Dubey shares his inspiring story with CricketNext. (harsh_dubey23/Instagram)

At the post-match presentation ceremony of the Ranji Trophy 2024-25 final at Nagpur’s Vidarbha Cricket Association stadium, when all eyes are locked in on Player of the Series Harsh Dubey, he is searching for his father Surendra in the crowd.

He locates his mother, Jyoti, first.

Wrong (right) turn

It all started when Harsh was entering the fifth grade. He went out to buy books with his father and they ended up taking a wrong turn which landed them in front of Ruby Cricket Club in Nagpur. Harsh was curious, and his father was more than happy to enroll him.

“My parents never let me feel that we couldn’t afford something we needed," he said. “I was never a rich kid with a family business… so, honestly, they could have just done one thing for me: either support my studies or my cricket."

Early on, the club’s coach, Dilip Das loved Harsh’s batting and used him to strengthen the age-group team’s shaky middle order. Then, one day, when the team’s first-choice spinner was absent, a friend pushed the part-time — or in his words ‘time-pass spinner’ — Harsh forward in the nets. He made an impression too good for Das to not use him in the matches thereon.

By 2019, Harsh was a big part of India’s Under-19 plans. A call-up for that year’s junior World Cup was expected but didn’t come. However, instead of letting the disappointment pull him down, he spent the next two years working on his fitness and diet to become leaner and more athletic.

In 2021, he topped the wicket-taking chart in the Col. CK Nayudu Trophy and was sending down 50-60 overs each inning. Vidarbha gave him a List-A debut in February 2021, a T20 debut in November and then a First-Class debut the next December.

For the next two-and-half years, Harsh was an understudy to Vidarbha legend Aditya Sarwate. In his first seven matches, he picked a fairly decent 20 wickets but that was also what was going wrong for him — it was just seven matches, and he was an understudy.

The first sign of Harsh coming out of the cocoon came in the final of the 2023 Ranji Trophy against Mumbai. He was picked in the summit clash despite not playing in the semifinal.

In the first innings, he got the big wickets of Ajinkya Rahane, Prithvi Shaw and Musheer Khan. Mumbai still managed a big lead and before they came to bat third, Sarwate picked up a lower back injury which prevented him from bowling more than seven overs.

Harsh stepped up with a stunning 48 overs to record his first-ever five-wicket haul. When Mumbai managed to set a 538-run target, he hit a 65 (128), only his second half-century, to take Vidarbha from 223/5 at one stage to 353/6 and eventually 368 all-out.

The final was lost in front of a Wankhede crowd full of India legends but Vidarbha’s pride was kept intact by a 21-year-old. And the country was just starting to take notice.

Record-breaker

Relive 📹Triple Treat 👌👌👌
The 3⃣ wickets that helped Vidarbha all-rounder Harsh Dubey break the record for most wickets in a #RanjiTrophy season 👏👏#RanjiTrophy | @IDFCFIRSTBank | #Final
Scorecard ▶️ https://t.co/up5GVaflpp pic.twitter.com/xmyvOjiq36
— BCCI Domestic (@BCCIdomestic) February 28, 2025

Harsh and Vidarbha were hell-bent on making the 2024-25 Ranji Trophy season count. For the team, it was about reviewing and correcting the mistakes made in the previous seasons.

The most prominent one of them was that they were showing their best patience and ‘grit’ while batting in the second and fourth innings but not while setting targets. Preparations, like they do these days in Vidarbha, started only a few weeks after the final defeat against Mumbai, which hurt but didn’t shake off the determination.

“For us, even if we win, we see it as, ‘Yeah, we won, but what do we do next?’ Harsh says. “We have lost so many finals that it became a habit of how to move on quickly (laughs). Honestly, if you want to do good in life, then you have to forget things as soon as possible. If you are left in the same sadness or the same happiness, then you can’t grow. So, forget, focus on the next thing and don’t repeat the mistakes you made last time."

Personally, for Harsh, the season was full of exciting challenges from the get-go. Sarwate had moved on from Vidarbha, leaving the 22-year-old to lead the spin attack.

“Everyone was doubting if I would be able to do it in his absence," Harsh says. “Obviously, no one will show that, but everyone had that doubt. That’s because I wasn’t that consistent last season."

“I’ve been a lead spinner since childhood who has always got the ball early, as soon as the fast bowlers were done. But here, [with Sarwate around] I was a second spinner," he explains. “I used to get too desperate to do well. I still feel like that. So, I used to bowl a bit here and there in the excitement to get the wicket. This time when I knew what my role was, I could stick to the basics."

That desperation still existed in the season’s first match against Andhra Pradesh. On the first evening, he bowled seven overs conceding run-a-ball.

Confused as to why that was happening, he went back to check the footage of his bowling and realised that he was running quite fast in his run-up before deliveries, which was impacting his consistency. He knew it was because he wanted to prove his worth.

“The next day I focused on it, and I took four wickets. So that confidence of four wickets, then slowly all the excitement got settled and things became normal. Then I could express myself better," Harsh said.

Till the quarterfinals, he picked up at least seven wickets in all matches bar one. His performances included as many as six five-wicket hauls. Then, in the quarters against Tamil Nadu, on a flatter, pace-friendly track, he hit twin half-centuries.

With Vidarbha on a roll again, the semifinal welcomed them with a familiar storyline.

“The semi-final was against Mumbai," Harsh recalls. “We lost three matches to them in the last year – the final in Under-25, the final of last year (Ranji Trophy), and the quarterfinals of T20 (Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy). No idea what was happening against them. We, and especially I was like, ‘we won’t lose to them’. I mean, no matter what, we won’t lose. We played with that grit against them."

Vidarbha played Mumbai much better than last year. They put up 383 runs in the first innings without any batter scoring a century which helped them set a target of 406 runs in the final innings. Harsh then closed the game out with his seventh five-for.

“It was a great happiness," he says, the relief palpable in his voice. “If you watch the video of our celebrations, you will understand the raw emotions of that time. It was a great feeling."

The final brought back an old friend: Sarwate had moved to Kerala after nine years at Vidarbha and now was playing a second consecutive final at his former home.

Sarwate had seen Vidarbha’s transition from a team with a rich history but not a big identity aka Mumbai-like khadoos — stubborn, in terms of putting up a fight — group thanks to coaches belonging to the financial capital, like Paras Mhambrey and Chandrakant Pandit.

He brought a bit of that to Kerala as the team crashed, banged and walloped to the final with slender first-innings leads in successive draws. In the summit clash, Vidarbha put up 379 and Kerala looked ready to go past it, again, when Sarwate and skipper Sachin Baby had strung together 63 runs for the fourth wicket which took them to 170/3 in the 56th over.

But, Sarwate would have known that Harsh is the epitome of that stubbornness in this new generation. The youngster got the veteran out for 79 (185), with a beautifully looped-up ball that was edged to silly point. It was arguably the most important wicket of the match.

“I am very khadoos on the ground," Harsh says. “I don’t like to lose, honestly. It’s not like if I lose, I won’t appreciate the opponent. But yes, it’s been like that since childhood. So, in that match, I had already decided that I had gone through one final without winning, I wanted to win this one 100%, no matter what."

In the final, Salman Nizar stood with Baby for a while, but Dubey got him out too, equalling Bihar’s Ashutosh Aman’s tally of 68 wickets from 2018/19 for the most scalps in a Ranji season.

Baby and Jalaj Saxena went back in quick succession and in the 122nd over, Harsh had MD Nidheesh plumb in front for his 69th, breaking the all-time record for the most wickets in a single edition of the Ranji Trophy.

In the days leading up to the final, his teammates had mentioned the record in the dressing room multiple times — “You are these many away", “You only need these many now."

But Harsh says “time has taught" him to stay in the present so that’s what he did, pushing himself in drastic circumstances, not in search of the record, but for the team.

“My finger got cut and blood was gushing out before the last 10 overs of the innings," he says. “But I thought I couldn’t tell anyone and stop now. So, I bowled the last 10-12 overs with an almost-cut finger. Again, it was like, I can’t lose another final. So, I put in all my effort. Luckily, I got the 69th wicket. That was definitely a very good moment for me. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about the record till that time. But there was a place in my mind that if this happens, it will be good. However, if it doesn’t, it’s okay because I have contributed to my team’s victory."

In the end, he got the record as well as the win. Vidarbha managed to keep Kerala from taking a first-innings lead and were too stubborn to even get bowled out in the second.

It was Vidarbha’s third title in seven seasons and Harsh’s first. The Player-of-the-Series prize also recognised his 476 runs, with five half-centuries, in the season — making it one of the most complete performances in the history of the competition.

His DMs were flooded with congratulatory messages and his name was everywhere because of the record.

Suryakumar Yadav messaged him while Ravichandran Ashwin — who played a big role in his career by seeing his videos on YouTube and calling him to play for his local club in Chennai in the winter of 2022 — dropped a wholesome comment on an Instagram post.

“What I liked the most was that Prasidh Krishna messaged me because, in that innings in the final (Vijay Hazare Trophy 2025, where Vidarbha lost to Karnataka), I hit a lot of runs against him in his last over! He’s a very big bowler. I really liked his message because he took it so sportingly," Harsh says.

India bound?

Harsh smashed two sixes and two fours off Prasidh in his knock of 63 (30) in that final, while also bowling a 10-over spell with an economy rate of under five in a high-scoring game — a huge reminder that he’s not just a red-ball specialist.

He had been to trials with four big IPL franchises and got his name in the final list of the auction for the first time this year. However, he couldn’t find a contract.

“I won’t say it was a disappointment, honestly," he argues. “I have got another opportunity to do better."

There’s an India ‘A’ tour of England on the horizon and it won’t be a surprise if Harsh is one of the first names on the roster. In the senior team, Ashwin has retired and Ravindra Jadeja — another one of Harsh’s idols — is in the twilight of his career as well.

It would be difficult to see him break into the first eleven ahead of Washington Sundar and Axar Patel. But the selectors would need to keep the pipeline of spin allrounders going.

Who better than someone Ashwin has already hand-picked as his replacement once?

But, unlike most 22-year-olds, Harsh is too pragmatic to think about those things right now.

“See, the main goal is to represent India in the Test team and even in the white ball but I don’t want to complicate things by thinking about it," he says. “Otherwise, it goes to your head that one match goes bad, you think, ‘You want to play in India, what are you doing?’ So, I don’t want to put that additional baggage on myself. Yes, if I keep working hard, and stay loyal to my cricket, then I will get that thing someday. But I don’t want to think about that and complicate things. ‘I should get a chance in this tour, or my name in Duleep Trophy, or in the IPL, whatever, XYZ.’ I think I should stay in the present. I have an off-season, I’ll think about how I can do better than last year. That’s my planning. I don’t think much more than that."

Also, unlike other 22-year-olds, it’s easier to understand why the stamp of an India or IPL call-up, while significant, is not as important for him as improving further. It’s the same mindset that has got him this far.