South Zone find themselves in a precarious position after day 2 of their Duleep Trophy semifinal against East Zone as they lost five wickets for a score of 134 in reply to their opponent’s first innings score of 267.
The Times of India says that South Zone have a job on hand on the penultimate day if they intend to wrest the lead in the Duleep Trophy semifinal against East Zone.
Having allowed East Zone to defy them for 162 minutes on the second day at the ACA-VDCA Stadium and watch Saurabh Tiwary reach his seventh first-class century in his 29th match, South have only themselves to blame for being reduced to a sorry 134 for five on Monday; they need 133 more runs to overhaul East's 267.
Tiwary scored his six previous hundreds for Jharkhand but his first for the Zone, a workmanlike 145 (429m, 267b, 17x4, 2x6), and his seventh wicket partnership that realised 153 runs (234m, 311b) with Basant Mohanty (58, 234m, 171b, 4x4, 2x6) gave East a fighting total on a wicket that had nothing in it for the bowlers.
With skipper Vinay Kumar employing spin at both ends to start with, Tiwary quickly got into the groove and even the second new ball taken after 80.3 overs did not have the desired effect for South. The 100-mark soon followed for Tiwary -- he enhanced his first-class aggregate to 1990 runs with this knock.
Meanwhile The Hindu writes that At close on the second day, when play was called off due to bad light, South, after a breezy start launched by Robin Uthappa, was struggling at 134 for five. Amit Verma and C.M. Gautam held firm after Samantray’s perfect line and length consumed Manish Pandey and Stuart Binny off successive balls.
The twin-strike was a big blow as Pandey and Verma were trying to steer the team after it had lost the openers at 69 and Ashok Dinda, coming back after injury, trapped R. Prasanna.
When Uthappa launched into the attack, it appeared South would easily surpass East’s score of 267. He punished Dinda by slamming four fours in an over — to fine-leg, deep square-leg, covers and point — and the score had moved to 45 by the ninth over.
But left-arm spinner Iresh Saxena stalled the rampage. Abhinav Mukund played across and missed, and in the next over Uthappa played forward to Samantray only to manage an edge to the wicketkeeper.