Gandhi and debutant Arijit put Bengal in command on day two

Debutatant Arijit Bose's century and a swashbuckling innings of 128 by skipper Devang Gandhi placed Bengal in a commanding position in their Ranji Trophy tie against Tripura at the Eden Gardens today. Bengal finsihed the day at 333 for the loss of three wickets in reply to Tripura's first innings score of 170. The aim of the Bengal team is to pile on another 150 runs by lunch tomorrow and then put Tripura into bat again.

However, Devang Gandhi played a more cavalier knock, the talk of the day was Bose's innings. The 22 -year cricketer, who started playing the game quite late is incidentally the son of the former India opener Gopal Bose. Gopal Bose had played a couple of unofficial Tests for the country. Arijit, however, is quite different from his father in the sense that he is a left hander. More than the runs he scored it was the way he played the innings. The Tripura bowling had nothing really to offer. But even then Arijit Bose played with a lot of composure. The hallmark of his innings was the amount of time that he had to play his shots. His innings of 101 was marked with lovely drives through the cover. At times, he showed that he was ready even to hit the ball over the fielders. He finally fell, caught at point by Gourpada Banik of the bowling off medium pacer Rajiv DevBurman. He tried to drive a ball away from his body and as a result spooned it to point. But by then he had scored 101 in 184 balls with 15 fours. After the end of the day's play Bose said, "On Sunday, when I first went down to bat, I did not feel any pressure. Today however, pressure got to me. As I desperately wanted to reach three figures."

Gandhi's innings on the other hand was expected. He has changed his stance and now does not straighten up as he used to do last year. Against a mediocre Tripura bowling, it was expected that he would score runs. He reached his 100 cutting off-spinner Sujit Roy to the point boundary. At the end of the day he was unbeaten on 128 with 16 boundaries and three sixes. The last one was the best as he hit Chetan Sachdev for huge blow over mid wicket.

Rohan Gavaskar however, disappointed. He looked very patchy. Maybe, the slowness of the pitch affected his batting as he has been used to batting on harder tracks in Mumbai. He holed out at cover after being bogged down for quite sometime off Sachdev. At the end of the day, Saba karim, was keeping Devang company on 11.