Delayed since 2019 by the pandemic and years of chasing archival footage rights, the film pairs real cricket history with a fictional teenager finding her voice in a conservative home.
Seven years after it was first meant to hit screens, Abhinay Deo's Doosra finally has a release on the horizon, and its central idea hasn't changed one bit. The film takes Sourav Ganguly's shirt-waving celebration at the Lord's balcony after India's 2002 NatWest Final win over England and threads it into a fictional coming-of-age story set thousands of miles away from any cricket ground.
Plabita Borthakur plays Tara, a young woman stuck inside a conservative household who, watching Ganguly's act of defiance unfold on television, finds the nerve to push back against her own circumstances. It's not a biopic. Deo told The Free Press Journal in an exclusive conversation that the film could have used any cricketer's rebellious moment in theory, but it was Ganguly who actually did it, and that specific image is what the story is built around.
"It's not about him," Deo said of Ganguly, "if some other cricketer would have done it, we would have still used the same moment." But Dada, as he put it, was the one who pulled his shirt off on that balcony and turned a cricket win into something bigger.
So why has it taken until 2026 for Doosra to surface? Deo was candid about the gap. The film was shot across 2018 and 2019 and he had a cut ready by 2020, right as COVID shut everything down for roughly two and a half years. That alone would explain a lot of the delay. But the bigger headache, by his account, was stitching together real match footage sourced from multiple broadcasters and channels around the world with the scripted material, and then actually clearing the rights to use all of it. That process, he said, ate up another two and a half years on its own.
Deo's framing for the timing now is almost philosophical. "Samay," he said, using the Hindi word for time, is what mattered, and he feels this is finally the right moment for Doosra to come out, having only locked the final cut a few months ago.
There's a small, slightly wistful footnote to the production. Ganguly has known about the project since 2017-18, with communication between Deo's team and the cricketer's camp running since then. When the crew shot a segment at Lord's itself, they'd lined up a handful of interviews, Ganguly's included. He was actually at the ground that day. But he was too busy to sit down for it, and the interview never happened.
No release date has been confirmed yet, though with the footage finally locked and rights presumably cleared, Doosra looks closer to a theatrical run than it has been in years. Whether a 24-year-old cricket memory can carry a fictional coming-of-age story to audiences who weren't even born in 2002 is the real test waiting on the other side of that release date.
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