Eye on Ranji - III

The days of the likes of Kapil Dev, Rajinder Goel, Chetan Sharma and Amarjit Kaypee are gone. The days of being title contenders - or champions as they were in that great 1990-91 final - are gone as well. Nowadays, Haryana come in with the aim of managing to stay in the Super League. There, however, is a lesson to be learnt from Rajasthan's triumph last year. They came up from the Plate league and the new format provided them with three possible matches of their lives. They ended up on the right side of all three; they didn't even necessarily need to take 20 wickets. This new format is surely easier than the old one of two teams from groups of seven or eight making it to the semi-finals.

The knockouts might be the tough yet short route, but the longer route precedes. That of playing six matches and ending up in the top three. To help Haryana do that, the likes of Amit Mishra and Joginder Sharma need to step up. Mishra is coming off a poor England tour, and has lost the reputation of being the second-best Test spinner in the country. He will be the captain of the side, and will want to do something special before the tour of Australia. Apart from the two, it's a fairly young side, with Sunny Singh and Sachin Rana being the moderately experienced players.

Like last year, Haryana will have three goals going into the season. Firstly, make sure you don't end last and avoid relegation. Then, try to get into the top three. Then, it's anybody's tournament.

What they did last year
Last year Haryana would have realised anything is possible in this format. Having made sure they won't be relegated, they put in a surprise result by beating Uttar Pradesh. That took them into the quarter-finals on home turf against Tamil Nadu. Weather interruptions made it shorter than a one-innings shootout, and had they won the toss and known what run-rate to maintain batting second, they would have found themselves in the semi-final. As it turned out, Haryana batted first, and lost out on the basis of run-rates of uncompleted innings.

Men to watch
Mishra will surely be the one to watch, and he will have an understudy in Yuzvendra Chahal. Sunny will be their batting mainstay. Sunny is the only Haryana batsman to have scored a triple-century, but that was in the Plate League. In the Super League last year, he scored a total of 300 runs. He will want to address that situation.

After the high of 2008-09, when they reached the quarter-finals, and the low of 2009-10, when they finished second to last on points, Gujarat had a middling 2010-11 season. They mustered five draws, a win and a loss in their seven matches.

Gujarat lacked consistency with the bat: only two batsmen, Sunny Patel (who is not in the current squad) and Priyank Panchal, hit hundreds during the season, while none of those who played more than two games managed to average above 38.00. The bowling was over-dependent on legspinner Salil Yadav and medium pacers Ishwar Chaudhary and Siddharth Trivedi (also not in this season's squad). None of the other bowlers claimed more than four wickets in the season and even among the top three, only Yadav averaged below 32.00.

What they did last season
Gujarat's 2010-11 season was off to a promising start. In their opener against Railways they played themselves into a position to enforce a follow-on, and then came from behind in the second round to beat Saurashtra in a tight game. During the course of the competition, they drew with Bengal at home, and with Assam and Tamil Nadu away.

They had two off games however, when they capitulated woefully, to spoil any chance they had of progressing to the knockouts. Against Delhi, they imploded for 71 - the season's lowest total - within 24 overs. In a show of substance, though, they managed to bat out 129 overs in their second innings and deny Delhi an innings victory by one wicket. There was no such resolute comeback against Mumbai. They were handed a crushing innings and 167-run defeat, the worst loss of the season.

Men to watch
Gujarat are a bit light on experience, with only captain Parthiv Patel, Niraj Patel and Bhavik Thaker having played more than 20 first-class matches. Their 14-man squad includes debutant Faisal Dudhat, a 23-year-old fast bowler. In what is a big blow for the team, pace spearhead Siddharth Trivedi has transferred to Saurashtra this season, leaving the bowling looking vulnerable. The fast-bowling requirements will have to be primarily met by Amit Singh and Ishwar Chaudhary, who have played 27 first-class games between them.

Parthiv, the batting mainstay, had a poor last season, averaging 21.60 in six matches. In the team's best Ranji Trophy showing so far, in 2008-09, he led from the front, averaging 47.81 with a top score of 206. They will hope he shows some of that form again, after his summer with the national limited-overs team. While Parthiv must provide the flare, Gujarat will hope the experienced Niraj anchors the batting once more, as he had done in the previous two seasons.

It is difficult to imagine an Orissa squad without Debashish Mohanty and Shiv Sunder Das but that is precisely the kind of challenge confronting new captain Halhadar Das, as Orissa face up to a future without their two stalwarts. While Das was dropped midway last season, Mohanty has stepped in as coach after Orissa decided to part ways with their high-profile appointee Michael Bevan. Bevan coached the side in the Syed Mushtaq Ali tournament and also took them on a training tour to Australia, but his departure just as the domestic first-class season is about to begin has raised eyebrows. The advantage for Orissa is that Bevan's replacement knows the side better than almost everyone.

Mohanty's first task will be to get his batsmen to perform significantly better than the two centuries they managed among them in the previous season. With only two batsmen making more than 300 runs in 2010-11, it was no wonder that Orissa continued to languish in the lower reaches of the Super League. With Mohanty no longer available to share the new ball, they will also need to find some support for Basant Mohanty and Alok Chandra Sahoo.

Orissa are placed in Group A alongside defending champions Rajasthan and heavyweights like Mumbai, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. Add to that the presence of plucky sides like Railways and Saurashtra, and Orissa will do well to avoid relegation this season, something they have managed to do in the recent past without threatening to go further.

What they did last year
Orissa finished just above relegated Himachal Pradesh last season, failing to win even one of their six games. They began promisingly when they took a big first-innings lead against Baroda but were made to follow-on by UP in their next game, before being losing by an innings to Karnataka. They had to follow-on against Punjab as well but scrambled to take the lead against Himachal Pradesh. A disappointing season ended with a seven-wicket loss to Haryana.

Men to watch
Basanth Mohanty has been carrying the Orissa attack and has hovered around the 20-wicket mark for the past few seasons. He needs a stronger performance to make his presence felt though. Natraj Behera - who made the most runs for Orissa last season, and was also the BCCI Under-22 cricketer of the year 2009-10 - is one whom Orissa would expect to make the big scores.

Railwaymen pride themselves on being the unheralded long-distance men of Indian domestic cricket in this new millennium. Only Mumbai have won more Ranji titles in the 2000s, Railways winning two of their three finals. They also own a record that gives them bragging rights over Mumbai. In the last 13 years, Railways are the only Ranji champions to have won the Irani Cup - they did it not once but twice, both their Ranji wins followed up by Irani triumps in 2002-03 and 2005-06.

Yet, the clutch of players who formed the Railways engine room in the previous few seasons has dwindled down to five with the retirement of off spinner Kulamani Parida last season. The quintet of captain Sanjay Bangar, Yere Gowd, Murali Kartik, Jai P Yadav and Shreyas Khanolkar approach the new season with one eye on the matches ahead and the other on identifying which of their younger players are up for a confident baton-change.

With five of seven league games at home, this season is when the best of the next generation must wave the flag that gets the Railways side going. "We've lost a lot of players in the last few years and we want the next lot to come through to for the team and for themselves, to push for higher honours," Kartik said. "As a Railways man, you have to work extra hard to get noticed and all of us know that."

What they did last year
Railways began with a stumble, conceding first-innings' points at home to Gujarat and Assam, before dropping not just Rohit Sharma but the chance of a win against Mumbai who squeaked home in the 89th over. By the time they got to the last two rounds, Railways had mustered four points from five matches. Relegation to the Plate Division loomed, at which point, they located their missing bullet train. Railways first defeated Delhi, defending 135, and then Bengal with Yadav grabbing a second-innings five-for. In the quarter-final Baroda put Railways in, Munaf Patel ate up their middle order and Railways Ranji season ended.

Men to watch
The gen next men need to become the performers of the present. Khanolkar's opening partner Faiz Fazal could do with some hefty scores, while fast bowler Anureet Singh can take over some of Jai P Yadav's load. Anureet's 4 for 53 was the foundation of Railway's successful defence of 135 against Delhi, which prevented relegation. One of the new men in the yard this season is opening batsman Shivakant Shukla, who has transferred from Uttar Pradesh. Until now, Shukla is best remembered for batting UP into the 2008-09 final, with the fourth-longest innings in the history of first-class cricket.