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How Akshay Wadkar Became Central to Vidarbha’s Three Ranji Titles
Akshay Wadkar had played only four first-class matches when he walked into the 2017-18 Ranji Trophy final against Delhi. Two days later, the 23-year-old wicketkeeper-batter had his maiden first-class century in the biggest match of his young career.
The side he had just broken into had never previously reached a Ranji final. Wadkar was still establishing himself at the level and had made his first-class debut only in November.
Seven years later, he returned to the final carrying the captain’s responsibility after already experiencing two championships and one final defeat in the same competition.
By then, the mark beside his name on the scorecard had changed from wicketkeeper to wicketkeeper-captain for Vidarbha.
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Akshay Wadkar’s 2017-18 Final Century and the First Ranji Trophy
For most of its Ranji history, the side had operated outside the small group of teams regularly expected to reach the final. The team first appeared in the competition in 1957-58 and needed 61 seasons to win its maiden title. Its first appearance in the championship match came only in 2017-18.
Wadkar joined that season after it was already underway. His first-class debut came against Goa on 17 November 2017, less than six weeks before the final against Delhi began in Indore.
By the time the final started, he had played four first-class matches. His first Ranji season eventually brought 308 runs from six innings at an average of 61.60, with one hundred and two fifties. The hundred came in the final.
Delhi made 295 in the first innings. Wadkar came in as the wicketkeeper-batter in a side playing the first Ranji final in its history and produced 133 from 262 balls. His innings contained 16 fours and one six. It was his maiden first-class hundred.
The innings was built around time at the crease. Wadkar batted while the first-innings total moved far beyond Delhi’s score, including a 169-run seventh-wicket partnership with Aditya Sarwate. The total eventually reached 547, a lead of 252.
Delhi made 280 in the second innings, and Vidarbha completed a target of 29 for the loss of one wicket to win by nine wickets.
Wadkar was not the captain of that side. Faiz Fazal led the team in the maiden championship and remained captain when the trophy was defended the following season. Wadkar’s place in the first title was different. He was a new first-class player whose first century arrived in the match that produced the team’s first championship.
The following season established him as far more than a one-final contributor. Wadkar scored 725 runs in 11 Ranji matches in 2018-19. His 16 innings produced three hundreds and two fifties, with a highest score of 144 not out. He averaged 60.41, behind only Wasim Jaffer and Fazal among his team’s run-scorers.
His work behind the stumps continued alongside those runs. Wadkar was involved in 27 dismissals during the Ranji campaign, with 21 catches and six stumpings. When the team returned to the final, this time against Saurashtra in Nagpur, Wadkar made 45 from 115 balls in the first innings.
His side scored 312, and Saurashtra replied with 307. Wadkar was dismissed without scoring in the second innings as his team made 200. Saurashtra were then set 206 and bowled out for 127. The 78-run win completed a second consecutive Ranji championship.
The two seasons changed Wadkar’s position rapidly. He had debuted after the 2017-18 campaign was already underway, made the defining hundred of his first final, and then followed it with a 725-run season during the title defence.
His responsibility was still primarily with the bat and gloves, but he had become a regular member of a side that had moved from never reaching a Ranji final to winning two in succession.
From Title-Winning Wicketkeeper to Ranji Trophy Captain
Wadkar remained one of the regular middle-order batters after the back-to-back titles. In 2019-20, he scored another 428 Ranji runs from 11 innings at an average of 47.55, with one hundred and two fifties.
By the start of 2022-23, his place in the leadership group had also changed. He entered that Ranji season as vice-captain while Fazal continued as captain.
The transition did not arrive at the start of a new campaign.
It came in January 2023, with two league matches still to play. Wadkar replaced Fazal as captain for the games against Gujarat and Punjab after defeats to Jammu and Kashmir and Madhya Pradesh had badly damaged the team’s qualification hopes.
Wadkar later said the timing had caught him off guard.
“Honestly, I wasn’t really prepared at that time,” he recalled.
He had experience setting fields and reading the game from behind the stumps, but taking responsibility for an entire first-class match was new.
His first match in charge immediately tested that responsibility. The team was bowled out for 74 against Gujarat in Nagpur. Gujarat replied with 256, taking a first-innings lead of 182. Wadkar made a duck in the first innings and 34 in the second as his side recovered to 254, leaving Gujarat only 73 to win.
The target gave the new captain almost no margin. Gujarat resumed the third morning at six for one and were dismissed for 54. Aditya Sarwate took six wickets for 17, and Harsh Dubey took three for 11. The 18-run victory meant Wadkar’s first game as Ranji captain ended with his side defending the lowest target in an Indian first-class match at the time.
The result did not rescue the season. The final match against Punjab was drawn, with Wadkar making 71 from 115 balls. His team finished fourth in Elite Group D with 20 points, behind Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Railways, and did not reach the knockouts.
Those two matches still gave Wadkar his first experience of managing a Ranji side before he received the role for a full season. He later described speaking regularly with Fazal and former team-mate Wasim Jaffer while learning the job. His wicketkeeping also kept him close to the bowlers and gave him a direct view of how batters were responding to length, movement and field positions.
His description of captaincy has centred on flexibility rather than controlling every decision.
“I usually like to stay calm and composed on the field,” Wadkar said.
With experienced bowlers, he said he is comfortable letting them choose fields that suit their plans. With less experienced bowlers, he prefers more discussion before deciding how to proceed.
The captaincy did not reduce his batting or wicketkeeping workload. He still had to spend long periods behind the stumps before returning in the middle order. Wadkar has explained that batting at No. 5 or No. 6 gives him recovery time after keeping and often lets him start against an older ball before the second new ball becomes available.
Vidarbha returned to the Ranji final in Wadkar’s first full season as captain in 2023-24. He scored 637 runs in 16 innings at 39.81. The season contained seven fifties. His only hundred came in the last innings of the competition.
Before that hundred, he had already produced one of the innings that took the team into the final. In the semi-final against Madhya Pradesh, his side conceded an 82-run first-innings lead and then slipped to 161 for five in the second innings. Wadkar joined Yash Rathod and the pair added 158 for the sixth wicket.
Wadkar made 77 from 139 balls. Rathod made 141 from 200 balls. Their partnership took the score from 161 for five to 319 for six, and the innings eventually reached 402.
Madhya Pradesh were set 321 and dismissed for 258. The 62-run win took Wadkar to a Ranji final as captain for the first time, six years after his 133 had helped win the trophy as a young wicketkeeper-batter.
Akshay Wadkar’s 102 in the 2024 Ranji Final
The 2023-24 final against Mumbai brought Wadkar back to the match that had first established him in first-class cricket, but his responsibility was now different.
He was captain and wicketkeeper, and the game moved heavily against his side during the first two innings.
Mumbai made 224. Wadkar’s team were then dismissed for 105, conceding a first-innings deficit of 119. Mumbai’s second innings reached 418, which left a target of 538.
Wadkar entered the chase with the score at 133 for four. He first added 90 with Karun Nair, who made 74 from 220 balls. After Nair was dismissed at 223 for five, Wadkar was joined by Harsh Dubey.
The pair carried the innings into the fifth day. They batted through the first session without losing a wicket and added 130 for the sixth wicket. Wadkar reached his hundred from 196 balls, then fell for 102 from 199. His innings included nine fours and one six.
The dismissal left the score at 353 for six. Dubey made 65 before the remaining wickets fell and the innings ended at 368. Mumbai won by 169 runs.
The century gave Wadkar his second in two Ranji finals separated by more than six years. The circumstances were almost opposite. His 133 in 2017-18 had come while building a large first-innings lead in a championship victory. The 102 in 2024 came in the fourth innings, as captain, while trying to keep a chase of 538 alive.
Wadkar’s description of the final day focused on how the chase was being treated inside the team.
“It was never an option,” he said about giving up.
He said the plan was to play ball by ball and remain at the crease for as long as possible. The innings lasted until the afternoon of the fifth day.
The defeat became directly relevant to what followed because Wadkar remained captain. There was no change of leadership after reaching the final and losing it.
He later said the group looked at smaller mistakes from the campaign rather than treating one poor innings in the final as a reason to discard the methods that had taken them there.
That made 2024-25 the first season in which Wadkar began a Ranji campaign after experiencing a final defeat as captain. His previous two championship seasons had come under Fazal. His first full year in charge had ended one match short. The next campaign put his own batting and captaincy on the route back to the final.
The 722-Run Season That Ended With the Third Ranji Title
Wadkar’s 2024-25 Ranji season produced 722 runs from 18 innings in 10 matches. He averaged 45.12, scored two hundreds and two fifties, and finished with a highest score of 139.
The figures placed him behind Yash Rathod, Karun Nair and Danish Malewar among his team’s highest run-scorers.
His highest score came against Rajasthan in Jaipur in January 2025. The match had started badly. His side made 165, Rajasthan replied with 265, and a 100-run first-innings deficit had to be recovered.
Wadkar had made 34 in the first innings. In the second, he produced 139 from 269 balls. Rathod made 98 and Nachiket Bhute 87 as the total reached 428 for nine declared. Rajasthan were then bowled out for 107, turning the earlier deficit into a 221-run win. Wadkar was named player of the match.
The innings showed how his batting role continued alongside captaincy. He was still being used in situations where occupying the crease for a long period was required. That pattern appeared again in the knockouts.
In the quarter-final against Tamil Nadu, Wadkar made 24 from 86 balls in a first innings of 353. His contribution came during a 64-run partnership with Nair after the top order had been tested. The team won by 198 runs to move into the semi-final.
The next match was a rematch of the previous season’s final. Mumbai arrived as defending champions. Wadkar made 34 in the first innings as his side reached 383. Mumbai were dismissed for 270, giving the home team a 113-run lead.
The second innings then fell to 56 for four. Wadkar again joined Rathod.
Rathod scored 151 from 252 balls. Wadkar made 52 from 202. Their fifth-wicket partnership added 158 and occupied more than 60 overs. The total eventually reached 292, leaving Mumbai 406 to win.
Mumbai were dismissed for 325. The 80-run victory put Wadkar into a second consecutive final as captain, one year after his century in defeat at the Wankhede Stadium.
The final against Kerala began with another top-order problem. The score was 24 for three before Malewar and Nair put together 215 for the fourth wicket. Malewar made 153 and Nair 86. Wadkar contributed 23 as the first innings reached 379.
The captain then spent Kerala’s reply behind the stumps while the contest for the first-innings lead tightened. Kerala reached 324 for six, only 55 runs behind with four wickets remaining.
The last four wickets added 18 runs.
Kerala were dismissed for 342, leaving a 37-run lead. Harsh Dubey took the ninth wicket and, in doing so, reached 69 wickets for the season, a new Ranji Trophy record for a single campaign.
The 37-run advantage changed what Wadkar needed from the remainder of the match. Under the competition rule for a drawn knockout match, the first-innings lead decides which side advances, or which side takes the title in the final. His team therefore did not need a fourth-innings chase if it could use up the remaining time with the bat.
The second innings lasted 143.5 overs. Nair made 135 and Malewar 73. Wadkar made 25. By the time the score reached 375 for nine on the fifth day, Kerala had not received another innings, and Vidarbha became Ranji Trophy champions for the third time based on the first-innings lead.
The third title placed Wadkar in a role he had not held for the first two. Fazal had captained the championship teams of 2017-18 and 2018-19. Wadkar had been the wicketkeeper-batter, scoring 133 in the first final and 45 in the first innings of the second. In 2025, he was the captain responsible for the five-day match while still keeping wicket and batting in the middle order.
His connection to all three championship finals is unusually direct. Among the players who represented the Nagpur side on the field in each of those three title-winning finals, Wadkar is the common name. The first came in the fifth first-class match of his career. The third came after he had taken over the captaincy midway through a failed 2022-23 campaign, reached the next final, scored 102 in defeat and led the side back a year later.
The supporting numbers in 2024-25 also show the team Wadkar was captaining. Rathod finished as the competition’s highest run-scorer with 960. Nair made 863, Malewar 783 and Wadkar 722. Dubey’s 69 wickets were the highest in the tournament. Wadkar’s own contribution therefore came while leading a side with three other batters above 700 runs and the competition’s leading wicket-taker.
After the title, he connected the preparation directly to what had happened at Wankhede a year earlier.
“Last year, we lost the final. So we prepared during the monsoon itself,” Wadkar said.
The statement came after a campaign in which the team won six of its seven group matches, then beat Tamil Nadu and Mumbai in the knockouts before the drawn final against Kerala.
By the 2025 final, Wadkar no longer needed a defining hundred to have a substantial role in the match.
His scores were 23 and 25, but he kept wicket through Kerala’s 342 and captained through the contest for the first-innings lead before batting again in a second innings that prevented Kerala from beginning another innings.
The contrast with Indore in 2018 was in the job itself. Back then, his task was largely with bat and gloves. At Nagpur in 2025, the scorecard carried his name as captain when the match ended at 375 for nine. The final did not contain another Wadkar hundred. This time, the captaincy mark beside his name showed how far his role had changed.
FAQs
Q: How many Ranji Trophy titles has Akshay Wadkar won with the team?
A: Akshay Wadkar has been part of three Ranji Trophy championship campaigns, in 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2024-25. He played under captain Faiz Fazal in the first two and captained the side to the third title.
Q: What did Akshay Wadkar score in his first Ranji Trophy final?
A: Wadkar scored 133 from 262 balls against Delhi in the 2017-18 final. It was his maiden first-class century and helped his team build a first-innings total of 547 before winning by nine wickets.
Q: When did Akshay Wadkar become Ranji Trophy captain?
A: Wadkar took over midway through the 2022-23 Ranji Trophy season. He was appointed for the final two league matches and later continued as captain, leading the side to the 2023-24 final and the 2024-25 championship.
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References
Indian Express (Sports Desk). (2025, March 2). Ranji Trophy winners list: Vidarbha win 3rd title in seven years. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/ranji-trophy-winners-list-vidarbha-third-title-kerala-final-9863838
Indian Express, Devendra Pandey. (2019, April 5). Citing health issues, Vidarbha coach Chandrakant Pandit steps down. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/citing-health-issues-chandrakant-pandit-steps-down-as-vidarbha-coach-5659392/
CricTracker, Rathnam Nayak. (2025, April 14). “Ever since I started playing Ranji, my aim has been to represent India”: Akshay Wadkar. https://www.crictracker.com/cricket-interviews/exclusive-ever-since-i-started-playing-ranji-my-aim-has-been-to-represent-india-akshay-wadkar-0991/
Times of India (Sports Desk). (2025, March 2). Vidarbha crowned Ranji Trophy champions after draw with Kerala; win third domestic title. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/news/vidarbha-crowned-ranji-trophy-champions-after-draw-with-kerala-win-third-domestic-title/articleshow/118661443.cms
Vidarbha cricket team. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidarbha_cricket_team
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