A Notebook from the Gujarat Nets: The IPL 2026 Morning That Changed My Reporting

April 2026, 9:40 a.m. at the Rajkot nets. On the third strip a Gujarat Lions seamer was scuffing his run-up mark with his boot, and I was writing in my notebook: 'Third net, 9:40, old ball, seam towards the nineteenth.' For the next forty-one days I wrote the same way. The franchise finished seventh, won four of fourteen, and few read my 600-word nets notebooks. But those forty-one mornings changed the direction of my journalism — I write that today, eight years later, without hesitation.

This is not a story about traffic. It is a story about how a beat keeper learns to file the observation before the verdict. When I joined The Times of India's sports desk in 2026, the notebook was our only file. Thirty years later, when the cricket page was cut to a single column, I was moved to a digital desk and handed the Gujarat Lions beat. It was a journey from newsprint ink to screen, but the rhythm stayed the same — the rhythm that was built on paper.

That season I added a rule to my notebook: anything seen at training must be confirmed by two sources — the player's own words or a coach's confirmation. Never an agent's line. The rule slowed my copy by a day and made it the most quoted on the beat. That is where my 'two-source rule' began, and it still applies before every training-ground report.

Gujarat Lions' season was poor — fourteen matches, four wins, seventh place. But the season matters to me because that is when I understood that the small things visible at the nets — the seam of the ball, the angle of the run-up, the batsman's foot — speak the truth before the match-day numbers do. Two of my seam-position notes were screenshotted and kept by the team's video analyst. That was my first signal that the nets notebook is not just a reporter's hobby; it is also the team's data.

But there is a twist that outsiders often miss. People assume data analysts enter the dressing room and understand the rhythm of the game. My experience is the opposite. In 2026, when cricket stopped for eight months, I digitised thirty-one years of notebooks — 214 of them — indexed by ground, bowler and session. When domestic cricket resumed, I was the only reporter on the beat who could pull a 2026 Motera pitch note in under a minute. That was data, but its root was my eyes, not a screenshot.

February 2026, Narendra Modi Stadium, four mornings before the pink-ball Test. I stood behind the Gujarat nets watching Axar Patel's arm angle against left-handers. I wrote a carefully hedged note — England's top order would not be able to score off the straight ball. Axar took eleven wickets, England were bowled out for 112 and 81, India won by ten wickets inside two days. My desk wanted the 'pink-ball magic' angle. I refused and wrote instead about the length Axar had bowled in a Ranji semifinal three seasons earlier.

This is the root of the habit I call the 'ninety-sessions test.' Every new tool — DRS, the Impact Player rule, data desks, tracking apps — I measure by how many nets sessions it took to earn my trust. This is not technophobia. The point is simply that a method must survive eyewitness verification before it earns a sentence in my copy. After 2026 I started a prediction ledger — every pre-match technical claim, dated and signed. Each March I review it. The ledger made me slower to call anything a breakthrough. By 2026 I would not describe a batting collapse until I had checked the ball-tracking and the pitch report myself.

Now the point that matters most in today's transfer-window season. Right now every channel is running 'sources say' stories — whose contract is breaking, who is being bid for, whose purse is emptying. There is no column for these in my notebook. A transfer fee is a rumour with a deadline attached to it. Only what a document or a session proves enters my copy. That is why the team's analyst kept my nets notebook that season, but I never wrote an agent's 'source.'

One more thing has become clear across four decades — and it comes not from a screenshot but from my attendance register. The IPL did not kill Test cricket in India; Tests still sell out here. It hollowed out the Ranji Trophy, and the coverage numbers prove it. I was there when the Ranji press box was full. But if I wrote 'nobody covers domestic cricket anymore' on the strength of that memory alone, I would fail my own test. So I put current coverage volume, attendance and broadcast hours against the older era, and let the comparison speak.

Through all of this, one habit has stayed fixed: writing session by session. Gujarat Lions' season is memorable to me because that is when I began moving my notebook onto the screen — the notebook went to a screen; the rhythm stayed on paper. Today, when I write about a player's form, I first check my own logged record of his last ten nets sessions. In a crisis I read my own files first, then the press release.

Those forty-one mornings in Rajkot taught me something more valuable than any traffic report — what is visible must be lived before it is written. And in an empty stadium, for the first time, you hear the bat, not the applause. In today's transfer-window noise one question keeps returning to me: when every channel is auctioning 'sources,' which reporter is standing at the nets session where the real story began before the first ball?