Cricinfo's New Series Depth Index: Counting the 'Unseen Names' of Domestic Cricket

The file that reached my desk on Monday morning was not a scorecard. It was a roll of names — players across fourteen domestic series who had not featured in a single broadcast match in three seasons but still spent hours in coaching camps every week. The count hovered around sixty, but for me it was never a number; it was a queue. When Cricinfo announced a 'Series Depth Index' for domestic cricket, at first glance it looked like another data product. At second glance it was a count of the people the broadcast never puts on camera.

Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy, Syed Mushtaq Ali, and the Senior Women's One-Day competition have held records for decades. The problem was never a shortage of data, but the speed of reaching it. An opener makes 78 and 34 in a Ranji knockout week, and his scorecard is not updated until the next morning. Selectors pick the squad that same week. That gap — between the score and its counting — is the real ground this initiative stands on.

In my experience, I have watched domestic players whose names never appeared on a franchise scouting list, yet whose average has not dropped below 45 in four seasons. This is not a talent shortage. It is a structural matter of the selection machinery — where franchise scouting has displaced zonal selectors, those without a highlight reel stay back in the queue.

The most solid part of this index is that it shows player-wise situational splits — first innings versus second, against pace versus against spin, and most importantly, run rate in 'pressure overs.' Before this, such data was publicly available only for international matches. At domestic level it was an open secret — known to team managements, not to viewers.

For women's cricket this matters even more. After the 2026 home World Cup, the WPL's broadcast promise was large, but its benefit will show only when the pipeline beneath becomes visible. Several Senior Women's One-Day Trophy matches are still played without a scorer — on handwritten sheets. If the index digitises those sheets, it will preserve not one player's career but an entire generation's record.

There is a contrarian angle here, and it stings me. Products like a depth index can easily claim to be an 'alternative selection system' — as if data itself were the selector. It is not. Data can show the queue; the responsibility of picking a name from that queue still rests with a committee. If the board uses this index only as a media kit and never cites it in selection meetings, it will remain one more beautiful dashboard.

I remember, in 2026, when I asked three times to cover the Women's World Cup, a colleague said women's cricket 'doesn't sell.' At Derby, Harmanpreet's 171 broke that sentence not with a statistic but with a name. A depth index can do the same — provided it puts a name in every row, not just a percentage.

The thing to watch over the next six months is whether the index's numbers are updated before the selection meeting during a Ranji knockout week, or after. The answer will hide in exactly that: who this initiative is for — the viewer, or the queue still waiting its turn.