Stats: Rahul Dalal of Arunachal Pradesh ends Ranji Trophy 2019-20 season with 1340 runs

Rahul Dalal’s dream 2019-20 season came to an end on Friday after his team Arunachal Pradesh were rolled over inside three days by Meghalaya in the 9th round Ranji Trophy match. Rahul, in his maiden season for Arunachal, scored runs in all formats and stands as the only player with 2000+ runs in the 2019-20 Indian domestic season. The 28-year-old struck six fifties in eight innings during the Vijay Hazare Trophy and a couple of them in seven matches during the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 tournament.

Ranji Trophy gave Rahul Dalal a chance of registering himself in the record books despite the team wasn’t in the best of forms. Across the 17 innings in 9 matches, Dalal aggregated 1340 runs with help of four big centuries and five fifties. His best performance came against Mizoram where he scored 178 and an unbeaten 205 in respective innings. He recorded his career-best of 267* against Nagaland and nearly got another double ton when he made 190 against Bihar in the last game.

Rahul was the only positive for Arunachal Pradesh throughout the Ranji Trophy where they lost six matches outright and conceded the first-innings lead in the remaining three matches. A total of 17 players represented Arunachal in this tournament and 16 of them excluding Dalal aggregated 2032 runs. This meant Rahul’s 1340 runs accounted for 39.74% of runs scored by the Arunachal batters through the tournament.

Rahul Dalal’s 1340 runs are now the 2nd most number of runs by a player in a single edition of Ranji Trophy. The highest is recorded by VVS Laxman when he scored 1415 runs across 14 innings during the 1999-00 season. Dalal had a good chance to go past Laxman as he needed only 156 runs from his last three innings but ended up with only 80 runs. During the previous edition, Milind Kumar of Sikkim amassed 1331 runs across 14 innings.

In all likelihood, Rahul Dalal will finish as the leading run-getter of the Ranji Trophy 2019-20. It will be interesting to see if any other player even reaches 1000-run mark this season as all the five players with 900+ runs won’t be part of the knockouts – Taruwar Kohli (998), Puneet Bisht (976), Paras Dogra (967) and Sarfaraz Khan (928). In fact, the 751 runs by Goa’s Amit Verma are the highest runs by a player during the league phase from a team qualified to the knockouts.

(Stats as on February 14, 2020)