In August 2016, Jammu & Kashmir's former pacer Samiullah Beigh was running around and bowling with a tennis ball against the wall of his house compound. He would catch it on the rebound, and go back to his mark to bowling again. That was the limitation of his preparation for the upcoming Ranji Trophy season which was set to be played in neutral venues. "I wasn't the only one preparing like that," Beigh reminds.

The encounter of Burhan Wani in July that year had led to violent protests across Kashmir, leading to a 53-day strict curfew being imposed, with some areas under restriction till late in the year. Understandably the preparation of cricketers were bound to be impacted. It wasn't the first time that Kashmiri cricketers had trained under such restraints. It was almost becoming a norm. Curfews imposed during major civil unrest in 2008 and 2010 as well coincided with these preparations, so did the floods in 2014, and the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. No pre-season tournaments, selection matches getting scrapped were all part of the routine wherein the Jammu & Kashmir players would turn up for the domestic season unprepared.

For a bunch of players who were content with participating in the tournament, winning a one-odd game, and keeping their place in the side cemented, and with it, the badge of being a first-class cricketer, even that limited preparation served their purpose. Hope for anything more seemed unrealistic.

"All that changed once Bishan Singh Bedi came in as the coach in 2010," Beige claims. Jammu & Kashmir started winning. They nearly beat a Delhi team - which included Virender Sehwag, Ashish Nehra and Ishant Sharma - that season, reached the quarterfinals of Ranji Trophy in 2013-14, beat Mumbai in Mumbai in 2014-15, and through all that, Parvez Rasool and Umran Malik went on to play for the national team. They found a ray of hope, belief instilled, and aspirations soured.

In a few years, many players from the state made a mark in the IPL - Abdul Damad, Umran Mailk, Rasikh Salam Dar, Yudhvir Singh Charak. And in 2025-26, they eventually became Ranji Trophy champions. But what does that change really?

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Jammu & Kashmir asserted their dominance and displayed their talent at the biggest level in Indian domestic cricket when they beat Karnataka, a team that boasted of five cricketers with international experience, in the final of Ranji Trophy. That they could do that in front of a 5000-odd crowd - the kind of numbers rarely seen in domestic competitions played in tier-2 towns - cheering for the home side, must have been a lot of pressure, surely.