Hello and welcome to CricketCountry’s live cricket blog of the Vijay Hazare Trophy 2015-16 tournament, between Jharkhand and Karnataka at KSCA Stadium in Alur. Karnataka will be on a high after winning their previous game against Gujarat by VJD method. This was Karnataka’s second win of the tournament and have lost just one so far. Jharkhand on the other hand won their third match of the tournament comprehensively against Haryana and now sit pretty at the top of the table. A win against the defending champions will give them a lot of confidence, going into the rest of the tournament. Karnataka will be looking to carrying on their momentum into the gamer against Jharkhand as well.
Rahul Shukla was the pick of the bowlers for Jharkhand as he managed to pick up three wickets, giving away just 33 runs in eight overs. As far as the batting is concerned, it was opener Ishank Jaggi, who top-scored with an unbeaten 62 to guide his team home. MS Dhoni did not have to bat today as Jharkhand won the match by nine wickets with over 20 overs to spare. Karnataka once again struggled with their batting but had a couple of useful contributions. Mayank Agarwal scored 58 opening the innings, while Manish Pandey scored an unbeaten 94 to help his side to a respectable total of 233.
Gujarat kept losing wickets at regular intervals and were eventually reached 189 for 8 losing by 15 runs according to the revised target. Play had to stop temporarily as the light was very low in the stadium. Karnataka are currently placed at third in the table and a win against Jharkhand may take them to the top.
Squads:
Karnataka: Vinay Kumar (c), Mayank Agarwal, Sreenath Aravind, Stuart Binny, Praveen Dubey, CM Gautam (wk)Shreyas Gopal, Aniruddha Joshi, Sadiq Kirmani (wk), David Mathias, Abhimanyu Mithun, Karun Nair, Manish Pandey, KL Rahul, Abhishek Reddy, Ravikumar Samarth, Jagadeesha Suchith.
Jharkhand: Varun Aaron (c), Anand Singh, Ankit Dabas, Kumar Deobrat, MS Dhoni, Shiv Gautam, Ishank Jaggi, Jaskaran Singh, Kaushal Singh, Monu Kumar, Shahbaz Nadeem, Rahul Shukla, Sonu Singh, Sumit Kumar (wk), Saurabh Tiwary.