Chhattisgarh’s Amandeep Khare, who was once coached by Rahul Dravid, is chasing his India dream

Andhra’s spinners made life difficult for Chhattisgarh at the DVR Ground in Mulapadu, near Vijayawada. Saurabh Kumar, Tripurana Vijay and Lalith Mohan kept the scoring slow and kept taking wickets and at the other end Amandeep Khare saw his partners step up and try to play shots. So he stopped trying to score quickly. He fought back for long spells, switching between middle stump and off-stump to find the odd gap, and stayed until Chhattisgarh passed Andhra’s 231. When the last wicket fell, he was unbeaten on 89, 11 runs short of a hundred and his side six up.

That turned out to be enough. Andhra declared their second innings at 184 for 3, setting a target of 179, and Chhattisgarh chased it down in 35.1 overs for the loss of five wickets. Khare reached 30. It was Chhattisgarh’s first win of the Ranji Trophy Elite season and speaking to IndiaToday.in, it mattered more than the missing hundred.

He also scored in the first two games and neither ended in a win. “It’s not such a good feeling when you score but your team doesn’t win,” he said. This time, Chhattisgarh took the lead and they think it was a game changer. “After they took the lead, the pressure shifted to them. Then, in their quest to win outright, I feel like they announced it a little early.” Defeat would end their hopes of qualification. “If we had lost this match, we would have been out of contention for qualification,” he said. Instead, “we are now in dispute.”

Khare has been around for a while. He made his first-class debut against Tripura in Ranchi on 6 October 2016, in the first Ranji Trophy season Chhattisgarh had ever played, and scored a hundred in his second match against Andhra, finishing on 136 not out on the first day. A decade later, he has 17 first-class centuries, including two double hundreds: 210 against Vidarbha and an unbeaten 203 against Saurashtra.

The runs came in shorter formats as well. He has 2,649 List A runs at an average of 48.16 and 1,760 in T20s at a strike rate of 124.65 and has captained the state in all three formats. Some of his performances stuck in people’s memory. It was 156 against Jammu and Kashmir in Raipur last November and an unbeaten 176 at Hyderabad’s Gymkhana Ground earlier this year, where a ninth-wicket stand with Dev Aditya Singh denied Hyderabad a comprehensive victory. In June, he hit back-to-back centuries for Raipur Rhinos in the Chhattisgarh Cricket Premier League. Home Stats by Amandeep Khare

None of this moved him very high up the rankings. His only challenge for the Central Zone in the Duleep Trophy came in 2023-24 when he played one match and scored 31 runs in two innings. Neither Irani Cup nor India A was held. Since the start of 2023, according to Sportstar’s count, only two Central Zone players have scored more runs than his 2,027: ​​Madhya Pradesh’s Shubham Sharma and Vidarbha’s Yash Rathod.

Khare doesn’t pretend it doesn’t bother him. “You naturally feel like you deserve that opportunity, but you’re not getting that opportunity. It’s a bad feeling for a moment.” But he can explain it. Vidarbha, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand will all reach the knockouts and Chhattisgarh will not, so more players from these sides will end up in the zonal team. “But I don’t control those things,” he said.

What it can control is how it burns when people are watching. Since Chhattisgarh get out early, they only get one or two live games a year and Khare says he has made them count: nine hundreds and two fifties in 11 such games. “I feel those are the big stages where players normally experience pressure,” he said. “I feel very good on those stages because I have the opportunity to show what I am capable of.” The Duleep Trophy is not where he wants to stop. “I want to play for India A and ultimately my goal is to play for India.

Cricket was always at home. His grandfather played at school level and had to give it up due to family circumstances, but he loved the game and watched every match. Khare’s grandmother, mother and brother watch it equally closely and he grew up watching Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag on television. He started playing near his house with older boys and one of them told him he should try professional cricket. “I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time,” he said.

Inter-school matches followed and then the call-up order for the school representatives. He played under-14 and under-16 cricket for the state the year he joined and was sent to the Zonal Cricket Academy and the National Cricket Academy. Some flights and hotels convinced. “To a young child, all those things are extremely fascinating,” he said.

In 2016, he was in India’s under-19 squad for the World Cup. He made it three hundreds in the Vinoo Mankad Trophy, 404 runs in inter-zone matches (dismissed twice, average 202), 97 in the Challenger Trophy final and a hundred against Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. A minor injury in a warm-up game against the Chairman’s XI in Mumbai cost him the first few games of the tournament and the team won without him. “There was no reason for them to make changes in the team and I didn’t get a chance to play,” he said.

He kept coming up with something, mostly from coach Rahul Dravid. “He himself was a legendary player but he kept everything very normal and made sure everyone stayed relaxed,” Khare said. Once the day’s play was over, the team was told to leave the cricket behind and spend time together. Khare’s takeaway was simple: “you should know how to turn on and off.” Cricket requires eight or nine hours of undivided attention a day, and in those hours Dravid wanted the players to get to know each other. “The better your bond off the field, the more it reflects on the field. That was a very big life lesson for me.”

Chhattisgarh got Ranji Trophy membership in the same year, which solved the problem he feared. “I was worried from where I would play the Ranji Trophy,” he said. He has played all formats for the state since his first match and hardly missed a match or two. As captain, he now spends some of his time with the younger players, several of whom are from his hometown. “There are certain things that I experienced during my early days and I don’t want younger players to go through the same things,” he said.

Today, his idol is Virat Kohli and before him was Virender Sehwag, partly because both have played all three formats, which is the type of player Khare wants to be. It needs adjustment, he said: Test match now, T20 two days later, one-dayer four days later. “I keep asking myself questions and slowly I feel like I’m finding answers.” The advice he hears most from senior players, including some from the Indian side, is to keep things simple. “The simpler you keep your thoughts about cricket, the clearer your mind will be. And the clearer your mind, the better your chances of performing well.” He says he tries to make batting a little easier every year.

He believes there is enough left. “I am still hungry and feel that I can play cricket at a very high level for at least another 10-15 years,” he said. He also knows what is missing. “The only thing is, I need an opportunity. If I get it, I’ll definitely prove my point.”

– The end