Yet another cricket carnival has arrived in India. For the next three weeks or so, everything that is not cricket — North Korea’s nuclear test to dengue to the Nobel Prize — is going to be safely out of the prime slots of newspapers and news channels in this part of the world. Of course, this is not without its positive side. We will get an opportunity to learn if Ricky Ponting loves dhansak, or if Andrew Flintoff’s baby girl had a good time in Esselworld — not to forget that some historic photographic moments will also be thrown up, such as Brian Lara at the Sabarmati ashram, or Inzamam ul-Haq at a VLCC clinic. (Pity Inzamam will miss the tournament because of a silly penalty slapped on him by the ICC.)

But these things must be endured. We have survived much worse: global warming, Indian Idol, lifestyle magazines, waterlogging. What is another cricket tournament compared to such woes? At least some Indians will make money because of the Champions Trophy. Even if we don’t actually feel happy for them, we must pretend we do.

But perhaps the biggest service rendered by the curtain-raiser to the 2007 World Cup is this: it has driven home most convincingly the point that international cricket and domestic cricket are as different from each other as hockey is from, say, football. The launch of a new television channel for beaming domestic games is not why I think domestic cricket has been definitively separated from international cricket. In fact, the coming into being of Neo Sports had given cricket-lovers a reason to look forward to watching Ranji Trophy matches from inside their drawing rooms. (The players who have been playing Ranji matches to empty galleries for several years now could take heart from the fact that a few hundreds are watching them on TV.)

But no, when it comes to Indian cricket, things do not take routes that are either simple or logical. And hence, the scheduling of the Irani Trophy — the first match of the 2006-07 first-class season — after the Champions Trophy gets under way. The Irani Trophy, of course, is played between the last Ranji champions and the “rest of India”. It is only natural that a state team, which has won the premier domestic tournament, will have a couple or more players sent up to the national team. It is equally natural that for a tournament as important as the Champions Trophy, the best players must be picked to the national side, and sparing even one of them for playing some domestic tournament is out of the question.

And the peculiar problem that arises out of this situation has made the Irani Trophy game, being played in Nagpur at this moment, more irrelevant and dismal than it ought to be. Three players of the Ranji-winning Uttar Pradesh team — captain Mohammed Kaif, Suresh Raina and Rudra Pratap Singh — have been called to the national side. And Uttar Pradesh is no Bombay of yore, that it will have a score of probables waiting in the sidelines. At the end of Day I, the result is for everyone to see and draw their own conclusions from: UP, batting first, were bowled out for 148.

Why should a Ranji Trophy-winning team be humiliated in this way? And how long can the board remain insensitive to the needs of the domestic game because the latter cannot promise enough money?