Gagandeep and Gony dismiss Rajasthan cheaply
A round-up of the first day's play of the second-round matches of the Ranji Trophy Super League 2007-08
Cricinfo staff
10-Nov-2008
Punjab 115 for 2 (Sohal 66*) trail Rajasthan 133 (Yadav 41*, Gagandeep 4-37, Gony 4-39) by 18 runs
Scorecard
Scorecard
Twelve wickets fell on day one in Mohali after Gagandeep Singh and Manpreet Gony tore through Rajasthan's batting order and then Punjab lost two wickets as they looked to wipe out the first-innings deficit.
Gagandeep was the first to strike when he removed Shubhansu Vijay and Nikhil Doru in the space of four balls. Rajasthan looked set for a collapse at 9 for 2. That is what followed when Gony had Vineet Saxena caught behind for 9 and two balls later did the same to Venugopal Rao. There was no respite for Rajasthan as the two seamers struck thrice in four overs to reduce them to 22 for 7.
None of the top six reached double figures with three of them falling for ducks. Robin Bist led a brief revival by adding 28 with Pankaj Singh after which he lent support to No. 10 Vijay Yadav, whose unbeaten 41 was the innings' highest score. Yadav took Rajasthan past 100 after left-arm spinner Amol Kakkar had Bist caught for 39. But Gony ended his fight when he dismissed last batsman Gajendra Singh with 133 on the board. Sunny Sohal, the Punjab opener, scored half of that in the 36 overs the hosts batted before stumps. Batting with Uday Kaul, after Pankaj Singh picked up two wickets, Sohal will look to go past Rajasthan early on day two.
The situation was completely different at Surat's Lalbhai Contractor Stadium where Wasim Jaffer and Ajinkya Rahane made the Gujarat bowlers toil away all day while they took Mumbai to an imposing 327 for 2.
In their last match, Gujarat's bowlers, led by Siddharth Trivedi, bowled Saurashtra out of the game to hand their side an innings win. But today Trivedi went wicketless and his 16 overs went for 53 runs. Jaffer added 218 with Rahane and another 104 with Amol Muzumdar after his opening partner Sahil Kukreja was lbw to Ashraf Makda for a duck in the fourth over. Gujarat had to wait 57.2 more overs before they got their second wicket - Timil Patel had Rahane stumped for 104. After his dismissal, the run-rate, which had been at nearly four an over, slipped below three and a half. Jaffer scored 88 of his 172 in boundaries; Gujarat used seven bowlers in trying to stem the flow of runs.
Uttar Pradesh's bowlers, led by Praveen Kumar, also toiled for 90 overs but returned better results than Gujarat's by bundling out Baroda for 235. Praveen picked up 5 fof 71 but it was legspinner Piyush Chawla who gave UP the timely breakthroughs which included the wicket of Rakesh Solanki, the innings top scorer with 71. Solanki's partnership with Shatrunjay Gaekwad was blossoming at 48 when Chawla bowled Gaekwad for 18. Then when Solanki was trying to herd the tail-enders along, Chawla had him stumped with the score on 235. Praveen had slowed Baroda down with two early wickets - Satyajit Parab (22) and Azharuddin Bilakhia (40) - before he returned to wrap up the tail.
UP batted for three overs, in which they lost Ashish Kapoor - bowled by Irfan Pathan - for a duck. At stumps Tanmay Srivastava was batting with Praveen Gupta.
Anoop Pai anchored Hyderabad's innings with a patient unbeaten 102 after the first three wickets fell for 58 and at stumps the hosts reached 247 for 5 against Delhi. Pradeep Sangwan bowled D Ravi Teja in the second over and Ashish Nehra followed it up by bowling T Suman in the seventh. D Rushi Raj, who scored a half-century on debut in the previous match, batted 70 balls for his 28 and added 38 with Pai before being caught off Sangwan. Pai briefly upped the run-rate at Rushi Raji's fall by scoring at more than seven an over in adding 46 (off 35 balls) with Arjun Yadav (9). The revival began in earnest, even though the run-rate plummeted to 2.44, when Abhinav Kumar joined Pai at the crease. The two added 134 together before Abhinav was trapped leg before off Rajat Bhatia late in the day. His 186-ball 76 included nine fours while Pai's 239-ball innings had 11.
The honours on day one in Nasik belonged to Maharashtra, for whom Samad Fallah, a left-arm medium-pace bowler, took five out of the six Andhra wickets to fall, including that of centurion Hemal Watekar.
Fallah was in the thick of things right from his first over when he had opener Prasad Reddy caught for a duck. When he trapped Y Gnaneswara Rao leg before for 16, Andhra stumbled to 39 for 2 in 15 overs. But Bodapati Sumanth gave able support to Watekar with a 93-ball 45 and the two added 91 before Sumanth was run out. More help was on the way in the form of Satykumar Verma, who contributed 45 to the 116-run stand. When he fell, lbw to Fallah, Andhra were still well-placed at 246 for 4. But it turned around in the penultimate over of the day: off his first ball Fallah got Watekar to edge to the keeper and off his last he had D Kalyankrishna dismissed the same way for a duck. He will hope to better his best figures - 6 for 49 - on day two of his seventh first-class game.
Cheteshwar Pujara shrugged off a poor first game to score his eighth first-class century and at stumps the Orissa bowlers would have left the Khandheri Cricket Stadium in Rajkot in an apprehensive mood for they were unable to break his 173-run stand with Ravindra Jadeja.
Last month Pujara scored triple-centuries in a week at the same venue while participating in the CK Nayudu Under-22 tournament. Today when he came to the crease, Saurashtra were at 26 for 2 and two overs later they lost another wicket with only one run added to the total. Pujara began the rescue effort, helped by Shitanshu Kotak, who batted nearly two hours for his 37. The two scored at two and a half an over before Kotak was trapped lbw when Saurashtra were at 100. Jadeja's arrival improved the situation - the run-rate increased to nearly four - and they added 173 in 286 balls. Pujara, who spent more than five hours over his 128, hit 16 fours, while Jadeja (71) hit eight.
