Jharkhand's spinners on top

Stats review of the third round of Ranji Trophy matches

20-Nov-2012

Manoj Tiwary was involved in a century stand for the seventh wicket, India A v England XI, tour match, Mumbai, 1st day, October 30, 2012

After 51 hundreds were scored in the first two rounds, 24 more were added in the third, taking the overall tally of hundreds in this Ranji Trophy season to 75 in 36 matches. On the other hand, there were more five-wicket hauls in this round - 15 - than there were in the first two rounds combined (13).

Despite bowlers having a slightly better time in this round - the average runs per wicket was 34.23 compared to 39.29 in the first two rounds - only two of 12 matches produced decisive results. In the first two rounds, eight out of 24 had decisive outcomes, which means in the season so far, there have been 26 draws in 36 games.

Among those on the fringes of national selection, Manoj Tiwary used this round better than anyone else. His 191 against Gujarat was the second-highest score of this round, and it lifted his season after ordinary performances in his first two matches, in which he had scored 98 runs in four innings. His tally for the season is 289 in five innings, at an average of 57.80.

Overall, though, the highest run-scorer for this season is Himachal Pradesh's Paras Dogra, who has 462 runs in four innings, including hundreds in each match - 121, 210 and 122, the last of those against Andhra Pradesh in the third round. Punjab's Jiwanjot Singh is the other batsman with 400-plus runs in the season so far - 442 in four innings.

Arlen Konwar, Assam's offspinner, remains the only bowler to take ten wickets in a match this season, but three bowlers came close to achieving the feat in the third round, as Basant Mohanty of Orissa, Saurashtra's Ravindra Jadeja and Bhuvneshwar Kumar of Uttar Pradesh all took nine wickets in their matches. The leading wicket-taker in the season so far, though, is Jharkhand's Shahbaz Nadeem: in three matches he has 24 wickets at 16.79. In fact, two Jharkhand bowlers are among the top three wicket-takers, with Sunny Gupta, the offspinner, in third place with 18 at 17.61. In second place is Konwar with 20 wickets at 19.50.

Yashpal Singh of Services scored an unbeaten 250 against Tripura, which was the only double-hundred of the round. It's also the highest score by a Services batsman; the previous record also belonged to Yashpal, who'd scored 240, also against Tripura, a decade ago.

The other stand-out batting performance in this round came from Amol Mazumdar, who scored a century in each innings for Andhra against Himachal Pradesh, in the process taking over from Wasim Jaffer as the highest run-getter in Ranji Trophy history.

One of the two winnners in this round was Odisha, who beat Haryana by four wickets in a low-scoring match in Rohtak. It was Odisha's first win in a Ranji Trophy game in four years: the last time they won a match was in November 2008, when they beat Punjab in Bhubaneswar. Since then, and before this win against Haryana, they'd played 25 matches, losing 11 and drawing 14.

For Haryana, meanwhile, this has been a forgettable season so far, especially for their batsmen. They've lost both their matches, and languish at the bottom of group B, with the batsmen largely responsible for these results: in their first match of the season, they were bowled out for 55 by Vidarbha, their lowest first-class score; against Odisha, they were bundled out for 66, which is their joint third-lowest.

Sunny Gupta Manoj Tiwary Shahbaz Nadeem Arlen Konwar Paras Dogra India Ranji Trophy Indian Domestic Season

S Rajesh is stats editor of ESPNcricinfo. Follow him on Twitter