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Wherever Smaran Ravichandran goes, he brings trophies and records. Having won the CK Nayudu and Vijay Hazare titles for Karnataka within months, he doesn’t intend to stop anytime soon.
Karnataka’s Smaran Ravichandran has big goals in mind for the coming season.
Keeping it simple is often the hardest thing to do.
It’s easy to preach. But to not let things get complicated in the utter clutter of everything around you — nothing or no one can teach you that.
But simplicity works. It sells everywhere around you, in the viral street food on YouTube in your city which is magic created with just three ingredients, or on SharkTank where the biggest deals are snapped up by seemingly straightforward ideas and, in a way, it applies to sports too.
The yorker just does the job, and so does a forehand smash into the corner or even a slam-dunk. A weighted through ball can break the most in-form systems in the world.
Similarly, there are innumerable signs of brilliance in the simplicity of Bengaluru’s Smaran Ravichandran. Watching the 21-year-old bat won’t make you scream the typical left-hander adjective of elegant — instead, it’ll make you think about the immense work gone behind it.
His batting is methodical and poised and never seems short of answers for any kind of delivery, from all kinds of bowlers. Even in his debut season this year, he looked like he had the advantage of time, athleticism, and intelligence over his competitors.
And so, his impact was almost instantaneous. His 516 runs from 10 innings — at an average of 64.50 — made him the 13th batter to top Karnataka’s Ranji Trophy scoring charts in his maiden year and were the second-highest in the list.
In the Vijay Hazare Trophy (VHT), Smaran scored 433 runs in seven innings at 72.16, the second-highest for Karnataka and the 11th-best overall. The season was laced with two fifties in between centuries in his first List-A innings and a title-winning one in the final.
Now, he’s been reportedly being looked at for the India ‘A’ tour of England in the summer.
Engineering’s loss
Like it often does, it all started with cricket finding Smaran and Smaran finding cricket.
“My mom put me in the academy in our layout in JP Nagar,” he tells CricketNext over call.
“I was a very naughty kid at home, so she put me at the Academy nearby. My first cricket memory is of me just going there and holding the bat in a very different way. The coach over there then taught me how to correctly hold it… It’s still fresh in my mind.”
This coincidental meeting with coach Syed Zabiulla would shape Smaran from a restless kid into a patient rock at the crease and mark the foundation of his game.
He was eight years old when he started training under Zabiulla and 14-years-old when he made his Under-16 debut. There, he was scoring centuries, double-centuries and even triple-centuries in inter-club tournaments and was made Karnataka’s captain.
A year later, he was playing Under-19 cricket. Trips to Bengaluru’s National Cricket Academy (now Centre of Excellence) also became a regular feature.
Smaran’s family of four — his father, Ravichandran is a mechanical engineer and a Director at Enphase Solar, his mother, Sunanda R is a housewife and his sister, Surabhi, is an interior designer — were supportive in the initial days.
However, Ravichandran was also risk-averse in seeing sport as a career. Ever since Smaran’s early years in school, he wanted him to follow in the engineering footsteps, even if it was parallel to cricket, and pursue science as his main subject in 11th and 12th.
“I totally respect that decision,” Smaran says. “And right from the beginning, I used to balance both academics as well as cricket. But once I started climbing levels and started state cricket for Karnataka, I think my family understood that this was something that I could focus more on and make a career out of… So then they decided that commerce would be a better option to pursue rather than engineering because I could give more time towards cricket.”
Smaran scored 92% in his 10th standard and was home-schooled in commerce for the next two years while giving most of his time to state cricket, traveling and matches.
“Once the season got over, I used to sit with the books, open the books, and start studying maybe a week or two weeks prior to the exams,” he recalls. “So those two weeks used to be a really tough period for me, because all the portions that I missed out on during the academic year, I needed to catch up with them. Credit to my mom for pushing me to do well in my studies.”
Now, apart from being one of Karnataka’s biggest batting prospects, he’s also a Bachelor of Commerce graduate from Bengaluru’s Jain University. Engineering lost a diligent student but cricket gained so much more.
Getting the basics right
When Smaran began coaching under Zabiulla, he idolized Kumar Sangakkara and Mike Hussey, two left-handed greats whose batting and body language on TV inspired him. He wanted to be an all-rounder who could bowl off-spin, but eventually lost touch with bowling.
The coach took two decisive calls for him. First, Zabiulla was big on fitness.
His tall, and well-built frame makes him look much older than his peers even in the Ranji Trophy, let alone age-group cricket. That’s despite athleticism not running in his family.
He says that from quite early, two of Smaran’s four days of cricket training were dedicated to fitness. Initially, it was just running and, after he turned 16, going to the gym also became equally crucial.
Secondly, Smaran was never overburdened with nuances and complications of technique.
“Emphasis was only given to scoring runs and winning games for your team,” he says.
“That was the main role. Even now, the emphasis is only on winning games for the team. So technique-wise, I think it has just come naturally to me. Of course, a lot of work has been put in in the nets as well as drills, but I didn’t look to improve my technique or look good while scoring the runs.”
Zabiulla’s academy, thus, is the only one Smaran trusts even as a Karnataka cricketer and he’s one of the few he opens up to when needing help in navigating life outside the sport.
“He has been everything to me,” Smaran says. “More than a coach, I consider him as a family member. He has been really instrumental in shaping, not only my batting, but also in terms of all aspects of life, be it the mental aspect of the game, or just life in general.”
Smaran admits that climbing the steps of age-group cricket, he focussed a bit too much on making the Under-19 World Cup squad and representing India, even though he was considered quite close to getting a Ranji Trophy chance as a teenager. But when the World Cup call-up didn’t happen in 2022, he tightened his approach and batting technique.
“Many people have told me that I was supposed to make my [Ranji Trophy] debut at the age of 16… Only after [missing the World Cup], did I realize that representing Karnataka at the senior level is the most important aspect. So, I directed everything after that towards representing my state in all three formats of the game, and I’m glad that after last year’s performances, I got a chance to represent Karnataka this year.”
A brilliant introduction
Smaran made his debuts across formats in the last quarter of 2024, starting with the Ranji Trophy, then the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy (SMAT) and finally the VHT.
The call-ups were expected after his brilliant 829 runs in the CK Nayudu Trophy, where as captain, he led Karnataka to their first title in the Under-23 competition. In the 2024 Maharaja T20 Trophy — his second season after a difficult 2023 — he scored 302 runs at an average of 43.14 and a strike rate of 145.19 representing the Gulbarga Mystics.
The Ranji Trophy was divided into two halves. In the first, Smaran got off to good starts but couldn’t make them count. Karnataka still retained him for the SMAT and VHT.
The 50-over competition helped him unlock his potential. The century against Puducherry got him rolling and his consistency showed throughout.
When Karnataka were 67/3 in the first innings in the final, with the highest run-scorer and captain Mayank Agarwal just gotten out, hardly anyone lost hope.
“The wicket was good to bat, and my plan was just to take it deep,” Smaran, who had come in at number four, says. “And a huge thanks goes to Yere (Goud) sir, as well as KSCA for giving me a very specific role, which made things very easy for me out there in the middle. He just told me to bat the entirety of 50 overs and not worry about the score that we’re going to end up at. And I think that really worked out in my favour. To get 100 in the final is a very special moment. And more than that, winning a trophy for Karnataka after five years is very special.”
The good form eked out to the second half of the Ranji Trophy. Earlier, he was shuffling between number three and four positions but here he was allowed to stick with the latter.
With Karnataka needing two outright wins plus bonus points in the last two matches to have a shot at the knockouts, Smaran showed his best form against Punjab.
“After we bowled Punjab out for 55, when I walked into bat, the initial mindset was just to take my time and get settled in, because there was a lot of time left in the game,” he says.
“And once I started getting boundaries, I knew that I was set, I think it was just a matter of taking the bowling on. It was a very special moment to get my first 100 at home, at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. And once I got my 100, I knew that any way I was set and I could make it bigger and give my team an even better platform to bowl them out twice and win with an inning to spare. So I think I just carried on, and before I knew it, I was batting on 150-160. To convert it into a double hundred is a very special feeling.”
Karnataka couldn’t make it to the next stage in the Ranji Trophy but Smaran announced himself with this three-format consistency, which is also a new development in his career. Those who followed him in age-group cricket initially, saw him as more of a red-ball specialist.
He says he was always a good hitter of the ball, but has now consciously expanded his skills to suit white-ball cricket too. He has also noticed that even Test cricket is slowly moving towards more dynamic style of batting and spent most of the last off-season with Zabiulla, working on improving his range of shots and reducing the number of mishits for big shots.
“It’s more repetition of the same thing during practice. Hours and hours of batting are done in the nets just to get one or two shots in the match,” he says.
Most of this has been fueled by Smaran’s inherent patriotism for his state and his eagerness to help them retain their spot as one of the most decorated powerhouses of Indian domestic cricket. He knows that can only be done with trophies.
“It has always been my mindset to win championships for your team, and because that feeling is just unreal,” Smaran says. “So, everything that I do, be it batting or fielding, revolves around making my team win and bringing the trophy home. So that will continue to be in my mindset, and I hope that I can bring trophies more for Karnataka.”
So, although he’s seen as a future Karnataka senior captain in some circles, and there are links to Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) because of the franchise’s history of giving local players chances, Smaran believes everything else will follow if he does the job for his state.
“The next season will kick off soon so the immediate goal would be to get the Ranji Trophy back home in the next year, back for Karnataka,” he says. “And obviously the long-term goal is to represent the country. I think that’s a byproduct of winning trophies for your team. So yeah, that would be the plan.”
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