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Sunil Gavaskar has used his Sportstar column to deliver one of the sharper verdicts of his second career as a commentator: the boundaries at Indian grounds, he writes, are "ridiculously small," and the Board of Control for Cricket in India should lengthen them before the start of the next home season. The ask is specific to domestic cricket and the IPL, and it is timed to a calendar that now matters more than most. India's next senior white-ball World Cup is roughly a year away, and the team has just returned from a tour that exposed the gap between Indian hitting geometry and the geometry batters meet everywhere else.
Gavaskar is not arguing for any change to the playing conditions that govern international cricket. The ICC rule book already fixes a minimum and a maximum straight boundary and a minimum square boundary. What he is pressing for is administrative action by the BCCI: longer ropes at the venues the board controls, longer ropes at the IPL's ten home grounds, and a domestic calendar that forces batters to clear the larger ring in match conditions before they board a plane.
His case rests on a simple observation. In India, mishits clear the ropes. On the recent United Kingdom tour, those same mishits dropped short or landed in the hands of fielders positioned a few yards deeper. The discrepancy is not a coaching problem or a temperament problem, Gavaskar argues. It is a measurement problem, and it is one the BCCI can fix without waiting for an ICC rule change.
The boundary verdict
Gavaskar's word, "ridiculously," does a lot of the work in the column. It is the kind of adjective a former opener reserves for an issue he has been turning over for years and has finally decided to put in print. The verdict is also a departure from the usual Gavaskar register, which tends to frame criticism in technical, batting-shop language. Here the framing is consumer-facing: if you watched a domestic fifty or an IPL fifty this season, he is telling the reader, the rope was too close to the batter for any of those shots to count as evidence of hitting range.
That matters because the IPL is the single largest dataset the national selectors have on the batters in their pool. It is also the competition those batters play in front of the largest global broadcast audience. If the rope sits a metre or two closer to the bat than it does at, say, Old Trafford or the SCG, then a six hit in Mumbai is not the same shot as a six hit in Manchester. The shot looks the same on a highlight reel. The shot is not the same in the data.
Gavaskar is asking the BCCI to make that data honest. His preferred mechanism is administrative rather than legislative. The board does not need to negotiate with the ICC or the MCC or any foreign counterpart. It needs to instruct the curators at its affiliated centres, and the franchises that operate IPL venues, to lay the boundary ropes further out before the season begins.
The intervention is also pointed because it lands during a week when the BCCI's domestic calendar is being finalised for the next cycle. Ranji Trophy, the Irani Cup, the Duleep Trophy and the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy all feed selection. If Gavaskar's prescription is taken up, the batters who lift those trophies this winter will have done so against the geometry they will meet when they next board a flight to South Africa, England or Australia.
Why the United Kingdom trip matters
The trigger for the column is the United Kingdom tour India completed over the last fortnight. The trip ran two short formats against Ireland and two full series against England, and the win-loss ledger makes uncomfortable reading for the Indian camp. India lost the T20I series in Ireland 0-2. They lost the T20I series in England 0-4. They lost the ODI series in England 1-2. Across those seven internationals, India's batting unit rarely put together the kind of chase or repair job the format demanded.
Conditions are the obvious candidate for explanation. Belfast in mid-summer offers a different surface from any Indian venue, and the seam movement on offer at Malahide is not the movement batters encounter at the Wankhede or the Chinnaswamy. The team management and the new T20I captain, Shreyas Iyer, leaned on that explanation in their post-series remarks. Conditions were, in Iyer's words, "not perfect."
But the same conditions apply to both sides. England played the same pitches, the same overhead conditions and the same Kookaburra ball. They handled them. India did not. The gap, Gavaskar is arguing, starts somewhere else: in the muscle memory of a batting unit that has spent the last eighteen months clearing ropes two metres closer than the ropes it met at Old Trafford and Headingley.
For a batting group that has come to expect the ball to carry the rope on a miscue, the adjustment to a deeper field is not trivial. It is the difference between a controlled lofted drive and a skier. It is the difference between a slog-sweep that brings up a fifty and a slog-sweep that brings up a caught-and-bowled. India met those adjustments on the wrong side of them in England, and the scoreboard reflects it.
What Iyer said, and what he didn't
Shreyas Iyer's first series as India's full-time T20I captain was the Ireland-England double-header, and his post-series comments walked a careful line. Conditions in Belfast were, he said, not perfect. There were individual mistakes in the field. There were small moments in the powerplay that, if reversed, would have changed the shape of the chase. He did not blame the bowlers. He did not blame the batting order. He did not blame the IPL schedule. He pointed at conditions and execution.
What Iyer did not do was challenge the underlying geometry of Indian cricket. That is the gap Gavaskar has moved to fill from the commentary box. A captain is rarely going to use a press conference to argue that the surfaces he grew up playing on are too short. A former captain with nothing on his plate but the column deadline is in a different position, and Gavaskar has used that position to ask the question Iyer will not be asked to answer in his own voice.
The structural objection is also a personal one. Gavaskar played Test cricket in an era when Indian grounds had shorter straight boundaries than any other Test nation. He batted through the consequences, week after week, in series away from home. The argument he is now making is, in part, a request that the next generation of Indian batters does not have to learn the lesson the hard way on every tour.
The spinner perspective
Gavaskar also makes a second argument, one that gets less airtime but matters more to the bowlers. A short boundary changes the economics of slow bowling in the same way it changes the economics of batting. An Indian spinner operating at a venue with a tight rope cannot afford to flight the ball, cannot afford to give the batter a length to drive, and cannot afford to turn the ball into the wind. The only safe pace is medium-fast darts at the stumps, because anything slower or fuller risks disappearing over a rope that sits a metre or two inside where it should sit.
The result, Gavaskar argues, is a generation of Indian spinners who have learned to bowl a length they would not bowl if the boundary sat where it sits in, say, Galle or Christchurch. The drift is shorter, the loop is shallower, the turn is later. The spinner takes less wickets, concedes more in the middle overs, and looks less threatening than the spinner India produces for franchise leagues abroad where the ropes are honest.
England's Adil Rashid made the same point on a podcast in the days after the series ended, and Gavaskar quotes the spirit of that observation even when he does not name it. If India's premier white-ball spinners cannot flight the ball on home soil because the rope is too close, then Indian pitches are also training India's batsmen to face a brand of spin they will not face anywhere else. The home advantage becomes a home handicap.
For a team building towards a World Cup on subcontinental-style pitches, this is the part of the argument that should weigh hardest. The bowlers and the batters are both being trained on a geometry that does not exist outside the country. A longer rope restores the training conditions to something closer to the conditions the team will meet at the tournament.
The empty space behind the LED boards
Gavaskar's most practical observation is also the most under-reported. Almost every Indian cricket venue now operates a ring of LED advertising boards that sits inside the conventional boundary line. The space between the LED ring and the conventional boundary rope is, in many grounds, large enough to seat a row of chairs. In some grounds, it is large enough to lay out a small athletics track.
That space is currently used as a moat. Spectators sit on the inner ring, the LED panels rotate through their sponsor loops, and the boundary rope sits on the far side of the moat. The geometry is good for broadcast, because every camera angle catches a sponsor logo before it catches a fielder. It is bad for the cricket, because the boundary the batter sees from the crease is the boundary the LED ring creates, not the boundary the playing conditions define.
Gavaskar is essentially asking for the boundary to be moved out to the LED ring in many grounds, or further out still, and the LED panels to remain where they are. The change costs no infrastructure money. It costs no spectator sightline. It changes the geometry of every match in the country, and it does so without asking the ICC to renegotiate a single condition.
There are operational wrinkles. Grounds used for football, kabaddi or concerts in the off-season would need their rope positions reset on a match-by-match basis. A few IPL franchises have built bespoke fan experiences into the inner ring that would have to be moved. None of those wrinkles are show-stoppers. They are the routine work of ground management, and the BCCI has the administrative reach to handle them.
Timing pressure and the World Cup clock
What makes the column urgent, rather than just pointed, is the calendar. India's senior white-ball World Cup is scheduled for early 2027, and the qualifying cycle that feeds into it begins with the home season that runs from October 2026 through March 2027. If the BCCI moves the ropes for that season, the batters selected for the World Cup squad will have played between ten and twenty senior matches against the new geometry before they board the plane.
If the BCCI does not move the ropes, the squad will step off the plane and into a tournament where the geometry is the geometry they have not been training on. The selectors will be picking from a player pool whose recent form was compiled against the easier rope, and the bowlers in that pool will have spent the winter bowling darts because anything slower got hit.
Gavaskar is explicit that the change should come before the new season begins. He is also explicit that the change is not a silver bullet. A longer rope will not fix a technical flaw in a player's trigger movement, will not replace a quality fast-bowling unit, will not solve a death-over collapse. What it will do is remove one variable that is currently working against India's preparation. One variable, removed consistently across the domestic calendar, is enough to be worth the administrative work.
The argument also lands at a moment when the BCCI is reviewing its domestic schedule anyway. The Ranji Trophy has been shortened in some recent seasons to accommodate the IPL and India's international calendar. A boundary-size review sits naturally inside that wider review, and Gavaskar is timing his column to land while the review papers are open.
What the desk is watching next
The verified next step is an administrative signal from the BCCI or from one of the IPL franchises: a curator brief that specifies a new boundary distance, a grounds report that logs the existing distance against the proposed distance, or a public statement from a board official that the issue is being considered. Until one of those appears, the column remains a prescription from a former captain, not a board decision.
Coverage of the Indian cricket calendar, the domestic structure and the road to the next World Cup continues across the COMESPORTSBUZZ cricket desk. The next verified data point on this story is whether the venues used for the Duleep Trophy and the Irani Cup later this year move their ropes before the first ball is bowled.
For now, the verified picture is narrow. Sunil Gavaskar has called Indian boundary sizes "ridiculously small" and asked the BCCI to lengthen them before the World Cup year. He has pointed at the United Kingdom tour as evidence, at the LED advertising rings as available space, and at the spinners as collateral damage from the current geometry. Whether the board acts is, for the moment, a question the board has not yet answered in public.