Champions Karnataka look to dominate again

Karnataka

Where they finished last season
Champions, and were undefeated throughout the tournament

Big Picture
They won three out of four titles last domestic season, and have already retained the Vijay Hazare trophy in this one. Next on Karnataka's list is the Ranji Trophy but they will be short of a few players.

KL Rahul, who was their top-scorer in 2013-14, is with the India Test squad in Australia. Ganesh Satish, who had been with Karnataka since making his first-class debut in November 2008, cited lack of opportunities and moved to Vidarbha. Amit Verma also ended a seven-season association with the state and switched to Kerala.

However, a large part of the batting core - Robin Uthappa, Manish Pandey, Karun Nair, Mayank Agarwal and Stuart Binny - remains intact and they are in good form as well. The bowlers - Vinay Kumar, Abhimanyu Mithun, HS Sharath, S Aravind and Shreyas Gopal - would look to reprise the effectiveness that led Karnataka to seven outright wins in eight matches last season - a run of six coming into the semi-final. They have four home matches this time and have a tendency to give their seamers an extra bite with sporting pitches.

"Our goal is to dominate Indian cricket for the next ten years," Vinay had said in February. He will set those plans in motion on Sunday when his side meets Tamil Nadu in Bangalore.

Player to watch
Karun Nair made his Ranji Trophy debut last season and swindled 494 runs from six matches. Three successive centuries and an average of 61.75 merited attention, which he got from Rajasthan Royals in the previous IPL season. A useful defensive technique, a mind for calculated strokeplay and strength against spin allows him to flourish in the middle-order and Karnataka will hope he can continue hitting those high notes.

Teamspeak
"[As for KL Rahul's absence] We have Mayank Agarwal, who's doing really well," batting coach J Arunkumar said. "He's kind of a complete contrast to how KL bats. But the art of cricket is now about getting runs and wickets, it's not about technique. We'll miss KL, but I think Mayank is in a very good state of mind and technically also he's improved a lot. I think it's the right time for him to make a mark in the big league."

Tamil Nadu

Where they finished last season
In seventh position in Group B, the same position they had finished at in the 2012-13 season as well.

Big Picture
The first two seasons of the three-tier Ranji Trophy have been far from fruitful for Tamil Nadu; the team, which had made the knockouts for three successive years prior to the restructuring, has not come anywhere close to progressing past the group stage these past two seasons.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the team will have to cope with the absence of S Badrinath. For well over a decade, Tamil Nadu and Badrinath have emerged as two sides of the same coin. But in a bid to get himself out of his comfort zone and prolong his career, Badrinath decided to turn professional and join Vidarbha mid-season. Add to that the absence of M Vijay, who will miss at least the first half of the league stage due to national duty, and it leaves a huge workload on the shoulders of Abhinav Mukund, Dinesh Karthik and B Aparajith.

The bigger problem, though, lies with the bowling department. Tamil Nadu terribly missed wicket-taking bowlers last season. The fact that their highest wicket-taker for the season, M Rangarajan, could claim only 26 wickets - 34 bowlers took more wickets than that - demonstrates the void in the department. If the bowlers don't get into the wicket columns, then Tamil Nadu will find it tough to revive their fortunes.

Player to watch
He is still not 21, but B Aparajith already has the experience of three domestic seasons behind him. The least flamboyant of Unmukt Chand's 2012 Under-19 World Cup-winning squad, Aparajith has graduated to first-class cricket with élan. In the absence of Vijay and Badrinath, he will have to step up and emerge as the leader of Tamil Nadu's batting unit.