Vijay Hazare Trophy: List of Winners and Runner-ups

Saurashtra defeated Maharashtra in the Vijay Hazare Trophy 2022-23 final by five wickets to lift their second title. It was Sheldon Jackson's 133 that led the team to surmount the 249-run target set by Maharashtra, who had a centurion of their own in Ruturaj Gaikwad, who smacked his fourth ton in five matches. 

Gaikwad struck four sixes and seven fours in his 131-ball 108, while handy 30s from Azim Kazi (37 off 33) and Naushad Shaikh (31 off 23) launched Maharashtra to 248/9, with Saurashtra medium-pacer Chirag Jani scalping three wickets. 

In their chase, Jackson found an able ally in Harvik Desai, who played the perfect foil to him in a 125-run opening stand. Desai's 50 off 67 had seven fours but it was Jackson's calculatedly aggressive 133 off 136, laced with 12 fours and five sixes, that kept Saurashtra on track despite Mukesh Choudhary's double strike in the 26th over. After a three-for with the ball, Jani doubled up the performance with an unbeaten 25-ball 30 to ensure Saurashtra went past the line inside 47 overs to clinch their second title.

Named after the legendary Indian cricketer Vijay Hazare, the first player in the nation to score a triple century in First-Class cricket, the tournament has been in existence since 1993-94. Until the 2001-02 season, the trophy did not follow the pattern of conducting finals, with teams playing within five zones, namely Central, East, North, South, and West, with no tournament winner named. However, a final round-robin stage was held for the top teams in each zone during the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons before a playoff format, including semi-finals and a final, was adopted in 2004-05.

Until the 2014-15 season, 27 teams were split into 5 zonal groups and after facing each team in the group once, the five winning teams along with the best performing runner-up used to qualify for the quarter-final stage, whereas the four other runners-up used to play the preliminary quarter-finals. The two winners of the pre-quarterfinals would then join the remaining six teams in the quarter-final stage.

For the following three seasons starting from 2015, the zonal groups were replaced with 4 groups of seven teams each. Whereas, in the 2018-19 season, the teams were divided into three elite groups and one plate group, comprising of Northeastern states such as Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and Sikkim. The top two elite groups and the Plate group, back then, had 9 teams while the third elite group had 10.

Vijay Hazare Trophy: List of Winners and Runner-ups of all the seasons