Cheteshwar Pujara was mid-innings when the news reached him. He was playing for his state side in the All India JP Atray Cricket Tournament, the kind of domestic fixture nobody outside the ground was watching, when word came through that he had been picked for India’s Test squad to host Australia starting Ocotber, 2010. Capt Sushil Kapoor, the tournament’s founding organising secretary, remembers the moment more than any trophy the tournament ever handed out. “We could all feel the joy,” he tells . “That’s what our tournament aspired to give youngsters.”

That tournament played its last ball this year. After 30 editions across 34 years, the All India JP Atray Cricket Tournament has been discontinued, its organisers unable to keep finding grounds in an increasingly crowded cricket calendar, and its recent editions thinned down to mostly Under-23 sides.

It began in grief. JP Atray, president of the Haryana Cricket Association and the state’s Additional Director General of Police, died in 1991 at the age of 50. “He had been the president of HCA as well as a cricket lover,” Kapoor says. “When he died, we decided to hold the one-day tournament in his memory.” IS Bindra, then president of the Punjab Cricket Association, helped get the first edition off the ground that same year, six teams, and Kapil Dev walked out for SWIL XI alongside his 1983 World Cup teammate Yashpal Sharma. “There would be huge crowds to see him play,” Kapoor says.

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1983 World Cup winning captain Kapil Dev (second from right) along with his SWIL XI team-mates in the initial years of the All India JP Atray Cricket Tournament at Sector 16 Stadium in Chandigarh.  (Special Arrangement)

The tournament kept finding its way back into cricket’s bigger story. When Sourav Ganguly was dropped from the Irani Trophy squad in 2008 and came to play here as part of his comeback bid, Kapoor says the crowd’s reaction matched what he had once seen for Kapil Dev. He remembers a young MS Dhoni, playing for Bihar, hitting sixes at Sector 16 ground to chase down a stiff Punjab total. He remembers Manoj Prabhakar leaving straight from a match to catch an evening train to Delhi for his wedding anniversary, and driving him to the station himself. He remembers Intikhab Alam turning up as chief guest, every young player in the tournament wanting his autograph.

More than 140 players who went on to represent India passed through the tournament at some point. It grew from six teams to sixteen, drawing sides like ONGC and Air India alongside state associations, and prize money rose from Rs 75,000 in that first year to Rs 3 lakh in its last. Over three decades it moved across venues too, Sector 16, the IS Bindra PCA International Stadium, and the Dhruv Pandove Stadium in Patiala. VVS Laxman never played in it, but Kapoor remembers him praising the tournament anyway, for the hunger it gave young cricketers in Hyderabad to be part of it.

The organisers will keep running the Rama Atray Tournament for women, its seventh edition later this month. But the men’s tournament, built on the one-day format from the start, wasn’t something they wanted to reshape into something else just to keep it alive. “The biggest legacy of the tournament has been the ability to give youngsters the chance to score runs and take wickets,” says Vivek Atray, the tournament’s convenor and JP Atray’s son, “and to see them excel wherever that took them, whether it was India colours or state colours.”

When Sourav Ganguly was dropped from the Irani Trophy squad in 2008 and came to play here as part of his comeback bid. (Special Arrangement)
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Thirty editions, and the one story Kapoor reaches for first is still the one where a young man found out mid-match that he was going to play for his country.