South Zone

Venue is whatever the Board of Control for Cricket in India hands out that season — a ground in Chennai, one in Bengaluru, sometimes Coimbatore or Puducherry — because South Zone has never had a home of its own. The side draws on Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Hyderabad, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and plays wherever the fixture list sends it.

Formed in 1961, it went straight into a Duleep Trophy final that first season and lost it to West Zone. That defeat set the pattern for the rivalry rather than closing it: South Zone answered by winning three Duleep Trophies in a row from 1965–66 to 1967–68, then spent long stretches waiting for the next one, including a fifteen-year gap that ended only in 2010–11. In 2022–23 it beat West Zone again, this time by 75 runs, to take the title once more.

The zonal system itself did not survive unbroken. In 2016 the Lodha Committee's reforms scrapped it in favour of India A, B and C sides, and South Zone effectively stood down until the format was restored for the 2021–22 season, picking up where it had left off.

Players who have worn its cap read like a cross-section of Indian cricket across generations: Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble came through it, as did V. V. S. Laxman. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Erapalli Prasanna played for it in an earlier era, before one-day cricket gave the side a second competition to chase, the Deodhar Trophy, which it added again in 2023 with a win over East Zone.

West Zone remains the match that matters most, the two sides having met repeatedly in finals since that first one in 1961–62.