West wrest control on opening day

Bengaluru continued to do a number on the groundsmen and light-metre toting umpires, but the hours of play which were possible yielded sporadic periods of good batting, consistent bowling and an abundance of cringy dismissals.   

In the end, West Zone came out ahead of South Zone by reducing the hosts to 182 for 7 from 65 overs on the opening day of their Duleep Trophy final at the M Chinnaswamy stadium here on Wednesday. 

It isn’t wrong to deduce that the day’s tally had something to do with overcast conditions for the ball did move about a bit in the first hour, but that would be ignoring the fact that the pitch was fairly docile for the remainder of the day.  

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Frankly, the wickets which fell before tea - six of them to be exact - were mostly down to poor batting, and a couple down to bad luck.

South, hoping Karnataka’s openers to make the most of home advantage, sent out R Samarth and Mayank Agarwal to take on West’s largely unknown pace trio of Arzan Nagwaswalla, Chintan Gaja and Atit Sheth. 

Although short on pace, the trio bowled it in the corridor and expected the openers to err. Lo and behold, they did not long after. 

Samarth slashed at a not-so-wide ball and ended up nicking it to Harvik Desai behind the stumps. 

Agarwal, who seems to have taken ‘aggressive batting’ a tad too seriously by walking out for every delivery, was lucky so often that it was only a matter of time before Sheth would have the right-hander nicking to Sarfaraz Khan at wide third slip. 

Down a couple of seasoned batters, it was down to Tilak Varma (40) and Hanuma Vihari (63) to calm the nerves.

The left-handed Varma didn’t do a very good job of that for his inability to assert himself was giving West the confidence to set tight fields and push him into strokes which he wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable playing. He managed 40 runs but they were streaky at best.  

Vihari, though, was a breath of fresh air. His ease of movement at the crease generally gives one the illusion that he has more time. What he did with that ‘added time’ was carefully pick the gaps and play strokes when the bad balls presented themselves. 

To West’s credit, they didn’t bowl too many bad balls, not until the pacers started feeling heavy after their second spells.   

Vihari’s seemingly effortless innings eventually came to an end in the most unfortunate of ways as he tried to dink Shams Mulani towards cover and ended up inside-edging the ball onto the stumps. This was an over before tea was taken. 

Washington Sundar and R Sai Kishore came out to take on West as play resumed post tea, but only four balls later, the rain took centrestage, and did so for seventy minutes. 

After the rain cleared, the umpires reckoned the quality of light wasn’t particularly good. So, two balls after everyone dragged their feet onto the ground, they had to walk back to the pavilion. It would be another 48 minutes before play would resume. 

Five overs were possible, and in that period, South lost Sai Kishore to a brute of a bouncer from Nagwaswalla. Washington and Vyshak Vijaykumar remained unbeaten, but South will know that they lost the opening day to West’s discipline.