India Under-19s

India's under-19 side traces its identity to the same structure that runs the senior team: a production line the Board of Control for Cricket in India built to test its best teenagers against the world before handing them the senior blue shirt. That line dates to a Youth Test against Pakistan on 20 January 1979, and the fixture has stayed the sharpest one on the calendar since — no trophy carries a name for it, but a meeting between the two age-group sides is still played as though it does.

The results since have been hard to argue with. India have lifted the ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup six times, in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2018, 2022 and 2026, and been beaten finalists on four further occasions. The Asia Cup record runs deeper still, eight titles since 1989. What separates the age-group side from most is how rarely a winning campaign turns out to be the peak of a career: the 2008 World Cup was won under a young Virat Kohli, and the dressing room has since sent on Yuvraj Singh, Irfan Pathan, Shubman Gill and others who outgrew the "Under-19" tag entirely. The side has no ground of its own, training instead out of the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru and playing wherever the tournament calendar sends it, though Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium turns up more often than most as a host.

Coaching the group has, at times, mattered as much as playing in it. Rahul Dravid took the job in 2015 and had his contract extended two years later, and the composure he was known for as a batter carried over into how the side was drilled — a generation of India's current internationals passed through his sessions before they were old enough to captain a senior team.