Canara Bank survive early shocks to sail home

Canara Bank won an intriguing encounter against Combined Districts by four wickets in the Moin-ud-Dowla Cup at Hyderabad's HMWS & SB ground today. After bundling out their rivals for 107, they were in for a shock losing their first six wickets for 18 before S Shiraguppi and Srinivas Murthy ferried them home with more than 11 overs to spare.

A brilliant opening burst by Vishnu Varadhan had the bankmen reeling at 18/6 in the 11th over. K Sriram fell to the fourth ball of the innings and Ben Johnson removed the other opener C Raghu. Vijay Bharadwaj, Sunil Joshi and G Balaji were all castled by the deadly Varadhan and when GK Amit Kumar was run out soon after, Districts were scenting an unlikely victory. It was not to be as they squandered 21 wides in the innings and allowed Shiraguppi (34) and Murthy (26) to add an unbroken 90 for the seventh wicket in the space of 28.2 overs as Canara Bank sailed home. Vishnu Varadhan finished with figures of 7-1-13-4.

Earlier, the Districts team squandered away a good start and were bowled out for 107 in 45.4 overs. Openers Venu (27) and Naveen Reddy (18) put on 42 runs off 17 overs. One drop Papi Reddy scored 18 but none of the remaining batsmen even got to double digits. The wickets were shared by NC Aiyappa (2), Vijay Bharadwaj (2), Srinivasa Murthy (3) and C Raghu (3).