The first day of the Delhi-Punjab Ranji Trophy Super League match started on an exciting note but ended with a yawn at the Roshanara Club here on Monday.
The players of both sides must have walked away with a feeling that this might just be a 'first innings pitch' - the team that scores more number of runs in their first innings is most likely to walk away with the spoils (in this case three points). Scoring an outright victory on this pitch could be an uphill task.
After being put into bat by Delhi, Punjab finished Day 1 at 237 for the loss of five wickets with a desire of "adding atleast 150 more on Day 2", as their new coach Arun Kumar put it. Both teams went home equally happy but if one goes compares the sessions, then Delhi won the first, second was even-steven while Punjab took the honours in the third session, with Sunny Sohal hitting his maiden ton.
The comeback man Ashish Nehra, who was in and out of the team due to his lack of fitness the last two seasons, was the pick of the Delhi bowlers. However, it was his pace partner Pradeep Sangwan who lured Yuvraj Singh with a bait outside the off-stump to send him back for a blob at the stroke of lunch. The score read 92/3.
It was just one of those days for Nehra when you could not discount his contribution and effort. Like when he was outguessing the opposition captain Pankaj Dharmani (16) and the highest scorer Sunny Sohal (110) over after over, continously from around the wicket, making the ball swing away accurately. Nehra failed to get the reward for his ahard work but it helped leggie Chaitnya Nanda (2-36) in scalping Dharmani with an average ball.
"For a bowler, who bowled really well, I thought Nehra was unlucky and should have returned with much more wickets. He caught the edge of the opposition batsmen a number of times but unfortunately it all fell short of either the slips or the wicketkeeper," said Vijay Dahiya, who is in his second season as a coach of Delhi.
Delhi elected to field expecting the pitch to offer movement. It did. But the juice, it seemed, dried up after the first two hours of the match. Asked whether they overestimated the pace of the pitch, a bit, Dahiya said: "It's not a ground we play on regularly. There was just a match against Saurashtra last season. Hence we are a little unfamiliar with the circumstances. We had played a couple of warm-up games at the Jamia ground and we didn't like the wicket there. Therefore, the best bet was the Roshnara Club. Ideally, we would have liked to pick up more wickets with the help of our quality pacers but the wicket started playing easy," stated Dahiya.
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