“As you age, these things matter,” he says.
The bat, the sleep, the recovery, the routines – they’re all part of who Dogra is. He still approaches cricket with the curiosity of someone who believes there is something left to learn.
“I’m still a student of the game,” he says. “It only hits me that I’m in my 40s when friends often joke about how they’re long retired and I’m still around playing. Some of their kids are starting to play now. I still wake up with that josh (enthusiasm).”
That josh becomes evident when you watch him on the field. When he does sprints, when he takes catches, when he pleads with the coaches to give him a few more throwdowns to correct his posture and footwork.
“I keep telling myself, you can never take things for granted even after all these years,” he says. “Your currency is your runs. And everyone attaches value to the runs you score and the matches you win. The moment that doesn’t come, you tend to have some doubts.”
“I genuinely wanted to understand from them the kind of role they saw me playing,” Dogra says. “Because when you come in and take over the captaincy straightaway, there will be some expectation.
“And when those expectations sometimes don’t match, things can go wrong. But fortunately for me, I have a great rapport with Mithun [Mahnas, ex JKCA sub-committee member] bhai. He made it easy for me.”
As seamless as his switch was, Dogra didn’t have a very productive season as a batter, managing just 362 runs in 14 innings at 27.84 – modest by his standards. “To their [JKCA’s] credit, there was no pressure on me,” Dogra says. “But I expected much better from myself.”
“That one run, that loss hurt me bad,” he says. “I was really down. I began wondering if I had it in me anymore to compete. But one I took the emotions out of it, I was motivated by Mithun bhai. I genuinely said, ‘not sure if I should…’ And he was like, no, the team still needs a leader like you. Just carry on.
“I asked him, ‘are you sure’ and he was certain. So I said, ‘chalo ek aur season‘ (okay, one more season).”
That move would turn out to be his best decision. For it helped him fulfil a dream he set out to achieve when he started in 2001-02. He’d never come closer to the title than he had in 2024-25. To go on to lift the trophy one season later was surreal.
“Maybe god wanted me to go through this journey in this manner,” he says. “Maybe the pain of that one-run loss to Kerala was meant to be, I don’t know. It just feels like god felt, ‘chalo, let’s now make him win the Ranji Trophy'”.
He has played alongside players across three teams now in domestic cricket, watched careers begin and end, and now finds himself sharing a dressing room with a generation that grew up watching a very different J&K cricket team.
“They used to see teams come and beat them inside three days,” Dogra says. “The perception of the stronger teams towards us was different. The question was ‘by how many runs or in how many days’. Now, to see that perception change feels immensely satisfying.
“Today when teams see an Auqib Nabi run in, they know this boy has the quality. Or when Samad bats, he can take the game away from the opposition. The match isn’t over. That fighting spirit we’re starting to see will be here to stay. Samad said before our final against Karnataka, ‘whatever happens in this final, we are here to dominate.’ It told you of the mindset change.”
As he reflects on his 25 years, there is a tinge of regret his IPL career didn’t pan the way he may have liked – thirteen matches across three teams, with his most-recent appearance coming in 2013. But over the years, Dogra has made peace with it.
“I did regret it for a while, but that’s done now,” he says. “Once I got over it, I realised there’s so much more to be thankful about.”
For now, though, there is another season to prepare for. Another bat to get right. Another set of throwdowns. Another training session. Another match. And, perhaps, another title.
Shashank Kishore is a senior correspondent at Cricinfo