East Zone defeats Central Zone to win Duleep Trophy for the first time. I did a double take when I saw this news. For perspective, both East and Central Zones were duds in cricket.
In the 70s, the only Test player from the East Zone was opener Gopal Bose (though I am not sure if he made it to Tests). The Central Zone had Salim Durrani - that is it. And maybe Hanumanth Singh made it into couple of tests,
The dominant zones were West, South and North - in that order.
The West zone was mainly Bombay - Gavaskar, Ramnath Parkar, Ajit Wadekar, (Dilip Vengsarkar after Wadekar retired), Ashok Mankad, Eknath Solkar, Sudhir Naik, Padmakar Shivalkar, and one outsider Karsan Ghavri.
The South had )from late 60s tolate 70s) Jayanthilal, Abbas Ali Bai, MAK Pataudi, Abid Ali, ML Jaisimha (all Hyderabad), Gundappa Vishwanath, Brijesh Patel, Roger Binny, Prasanna, Chandrasekhar (all Karnataka), Venkat (Tamil Nadu)
The North - Bedi, Kirti Azad, Arun Lal, Madan Lal
With that as background, I am still shaking my head in disbelief at this result.