After a rollicking game at Mysore, the Mumbai side has retained the Ranji Trophy title by beating Karnataka. The margin of the victory was only six runs, and that shows how closely fought the encounter was, between two teams that played good cricket right from the first day of the game.
On the fourth day of the game, which also turned out to be the last day, the Karnataka side needed 203 runs to win the game and they had seven wickets in hand. However, the manner in which Manish Pandey and Gautam Satish batted, it looked like the opposition bowling was almost next to nothing.
Pandey was the star of the show as he smacked almost every bowler on display from the Mumbai side and had the opposition by the scuff of their neck. In fact, his 144 off 151 balls ensured that Karnataka was 255/3 at one stage before the side collapsed.
Iqbal Abdullah started the slide with the wicket of Pandey and this was soon followed by Amit Verma off the same bowler. Satish was then caught plumb in front off the bowling of Dhawal Kulkarni to leave the Mumbai fans interested all of a sudden.
There was a 36 run partnership between Sunil Joshi and Stuart Binny, but in the end, Ajit Agarkar returned to capture a five wicket haul to lead the side to a win.
Earlier, the Mumbai team had been dismissed for 233 in their first innings after they had won the toss and elected to bat first. In reply, Karnataka was bowled out for 130, conceding a lead of 103 runs. In the second innings, the Mumbai side was down and out at 51/5 before a rearguard rescue act saw them post 234 all out.
This is the 39th time that Mumbai has won the Ranji Trophy. Last year, they had beaten Uttar Pradesh in the finals. In the last eight years, the Mumbai side has won the trophy five times, and the last time they lost in a Ranji Trophy finals was in 1990-91 when they had gone down in an equally pulsating encounter against Haryana. That had been Haryana’s first and only Ranji Trophy win till date.Ranji Trophy
