Ranji Trophy 2013 round four preview
Virender Sehwag (file photo)
The 4th round of Ranji Trophy 2013 will commence from 21st of November at various centres of India. In this round total of 12 matches will be played. After 3 round of matches the fight for places in knockout round is quite open in all groups. In this article all round 4 matches of Group A are covered.
At Mohali 3rd placed Punjab will host second placed Gujarat. Punjab will looks to bounce back after their lost against Mumbai in earlier match. They will heavily banks on in form Harbhajan Singh and experienced Yuvraj Singh for positive result. Eyes will be on performance of promising young stars like Mandeep Singh and Sandeep Sarmah. Gujrat will depends on Experienced Parthiv Patel and Outstation recruit Venugopal Rao. Both are on good form and among runs in this season so far. Young star Jasprit Burmah will spearhead the bowling attacks.
At Delhi, star stubbed Delhi will locks horn against Haryana. With stars like Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag in the squad, Delhi will be the team to beat in this group. Great news for Delhi is that Gambhir finds his form back and this will big bad news for Haryana team. Duo of Sehwag and Gambhir will try to perform well so that they can book a seat in team India’s SA bound flight. Run machine Mithun Manhas and young star Unmukt Chand are the other key performer for Delhi squad. Ashish Nehra will lead the bowlind squad of Delhi. Other hand, Haryana’s key players will be Mohit Sarmah, Rahul Dewan and Joinder Sarmah.
At Cuttak, two bottom placed teams Jharkhand and Odisha will fight for honour.First timer in the top tier Jharkhand fails to cope up with pressure of elite group. Players from Jharkhand produced some brilliant performance and hoping for some good performance so that they can earn maximum from away tie. Their skipper Shahbaj Nadeem is on good form and team’s bowling will depend on him. Batting will depend on Saurabh Tiwary aand Ishank Jaggi. Their pace attack comprising of Varun Aaron and Rahul Shukla are on good song and they can create havoc in any batting line up. In other hand, Odisha will bank on experience of Biplab Samantry , Basant Mohanty amd Nataraj Behera. Haldhar Das and Niranjan Behera are the other regular performer for Odisha.
At Nagpur, Host Vidarbha will face Karnataka. Bolstered by returning of Star Batsman Robin Uthappa Karnataka will look for their first win of the season. Wicket keeper CM Gautam will lead the squad in absence of R. Vinay Kumar. Mayank Agarwal and Manish Pandey are other batsman on whom team will depend for big score on Batting friendly Nagpur pitch. Abhimanyu Mithun and S. Arvind will shoulder the responsibility of bowling department of Karnataka. In Vidarbha camp all will look upon the Umesh Yadav to destroy the strong batting line up of Karnataka. Their batting department will be guided by Hemang Badani. They will also depend on consistent performer of domestic circuit like Faiz Faizal and Shalabh Shrivastava.
In this round all will keep eyes on the match between Delhi and Haryana. A good performance by Gambhir and Sehwag may be enough to seal their places in the Indian squad in upcoming tour of South Africa.