The English Lions are the visiting team in the 2007-08 Duleep Trophy. Bangladesh A and South Africa A have toured here before. The Bangladesh A side predictably got hammered even by the Zonal Sides. This years English Lions side includes Monty Panesar. This should promise high quality, competitive cricket in this tournament. However, the Duleep Trophy is less than ideal, as Paras Mhambrey writes on Cricinfo, given that it consists of scratch teams. This is no reflection on the attitude of the players, but is a reflection on a tournament format which doesn't work. The Zones are an administrative convenience for BCCI, and should not stray on to the field of play. The Deodhar Trophy, which is the ODI counterpart of the Duleep Trophy is equally useless for the same reasons. Further, if you look at cricketers who have made it to the India side in the recent past, almost none of them have made it on the back of great performances in the Duleep Trophy. The Duleep Trophy offers 2-3 games of higher quality cricket compared to the Ranji Trophy, not enough to let any selector make a firm judgement on a player's form or ability. The Ranji Trophy which is a longer tournament, which tests players are numerous venues in different conditions, is a much better breeding ground. Even the age group teams have yielded more players for the national side than the Duleep Trophy.
The Duleep Trophy does not meet any of the criteria for a first class cricket tournament - the teams in it are scratch combinations and have little or no stake in winning the tournament as a team, the tournament is too short to enable any sort of team building, the tournament does not fulfill its purpose as a selection tournament, because players who have done well in the duleep trophy have not been selected for India in recent years - Ranji teams and India Under 19 are more likely to yield an India cricketer than a Duleep Trophy team is! Why then is this tournament being played?
Ideally, the tournament should be scrapped and the Ranji Trophy should instead be extended.