Vijay Hazare Trophy: Punjab defeat Tamil Nadu by 6 wickets

Vijay Hazare Trophy: Punjab defeat Tamil Nadu by 6 wickets: Vijay Hazare Trophy’s Group A might go down to the wire for deciding the 2 teams which will be qualifying for knockouts after Mumbai, Punjab and Tamil Nadu lost one and won one against each other as the Punjab team registered a 6-wicket win against Tamil Nadu at Hyderabad.

For the 3rd consecutive match at Gymkhana, Hyderabad in the ongoing tournament, the team winning the toss elected to bat. Harbhajan Singh, who missed out his side’s first two matches finally joined with their stand-in captain, Yuvraj Singh missing out for this game.

Tamil Nadu openers’ Abhinav Mukund and Dinesh Karthik made a cautious start against the moving ball. Especially, Karthik was on defensive mode leaving the ball outside off stump. At a stage, Karthik played 22 consecutive dot balls in the mandatory powerplay. Punjab’s paceman Siddharth Kaul bowled a miserly first spell 6-1-9-0. The other opener Mukund was looking good as he struck 4 fours in his innings of 28 runs till he holed out while pulling a delivery from Barinder Singh bringing an end to the 54-run opening stand.

Once the seam movement exhausted, Karthik went for his strokes with Aparajith giving him a great support. With both the batsmen going well with some classical strokes, Harbhajan Singh turned out to be expensive in his first spell conceding 37 runs in first 6 overs. But it was the part-time medium pacer Mandeep Singh who broke the 87-run partnership.

Karthik gave a simple catch to Harbhajan at midwicket after a well-made 69. Again it was Mandeep who sent back settle batsman Aparajith, this time with his brilliant fielding. Mandeep, who was fielding at point stopped the ball and threw it towards the keeper’s end but in the meantime Aparajith ran more than halfway down the pitch.

Later Aparajith’s twin brother Indrajith kept the runs coming at a quick pace along with Murali Vijay. After run-a-ball 45-run stand Vijay got stumped for 35 runs trying to play a wide delivery from Harbhajan drifted on the leg side. This wicket led to a disastrous collapse for Tamil Nadu with Siddarth Kaul running through their middle and lower order.

Kaul dismissed Indrajith and Ashwin in consecutive balls. Ashwin tried to play a shot on leg side on his very first ball but ended up edging to Harbhajan at midwicket. Barinder and Kaul ripped off the tail-enders as Tamil Nadu was bowled out for 226 from 209/3 with 23 balls still left in their innings.

Jiwanjot Singh and Pargat Singh opened the innings for Punjab after Manan Vohra suffered an injury while fielding. Rajagopal Sathish provided crucial breakthroughs at the start as he cleaned up Pargat and Mandeep Singh cheaply. Jiwanjot and Gurkeerat rebuilt Punjab innings with crucial 92-run stand for the 3rd wicket. As the runs came at the pace of more than required rate, pressure was on Tamil Nadu. Captain Ravichandran Ashwin kept bowling 2 over spells but couldn’t break the stand. Interestingly, 3 runs came from each of the first 4 overs of Ashwin. Pacer Mohammed broke the stand as Gurkeerat tried to guide a short delivery over third man where substitute Kaushik took a well-judged catch.

However, another big stand paved way towards the victory for Punjab. Mayank Siddana and Jiwanjot put on an 86-run stand for the 4th wicket. Siddana played his strokes and yielded runs at a strike rate above 90. Jiwanjot’s innings of 86 runs came to an end when he was stumped by Dinesh Karthik in Ravi Ashwin’s bowling, his only wicket which came in his 9th over. Siddanan remained unbeaten on 67 off 67 after he struck last 2 balls of the game for boundaries over the extra cover region.

Manan Vohra’s injury:

Halfway through Tamil Nadu’s innings, Punjab opener Manan Vohra had a cut on his webbing between middle and ring fingers on left hand. Soon he was taken to a nearby hospital. He had 4 stitches on his hand and is set to be out of the cricket field for at least 2 weeks.

Brief Scores:

Tamil Nadu – 226/10, 45.3 overs (Karthik 69, Aparajith 39; Kaul 4/17)

Punjab – 230/4, 44.5 overs (Jiwanjot Singh 85, Sidhana 67; Sathish 2/23)

Punjab won by six wickets.