Ganguly leads East to lopsided Duleep victory

By ICF Staff
October 22 2005

East Zone, under the leadership of Sourav Ganguly, complete an overwhelming 9-wicket win over favourites North in only three days.

Defending champions North Zone could not have anticipated a loss to the weak East Zone team, much less within 3 days in the 4-day Duleep Trophy match.

But as North captain Dinesh Mongia admitted, "Sourav’s presence made the difference."

East coach Paras Mhambrey added, "Sourav’s presence added a lot of weight to the side and I feel his presence helped the juniors to put up a good show in front of the most successful captain of the country."

BCCI selectors in attendance at the match are reported to have said that following Ganguly's century and all-round performance, his selection starting with the third ODI against Sri Lanka would be "automatic". He had been left out of the first two ODIs due to an elbow injury sustained in India's Zimbabwe tour that sidelined him for a couple of weeks.

East paceman Shib Shankar Paul bowled well on a pitch that had settled down on the third day, collecting 4/67.

Once again, North's best fast bowler Vikram Singh showed surprising resilience with bat, hitting 47 quick runs at the bottom of the order before Sourav Ganguly decided to take the ball against him. Ganguly clean bowled him in short order and caught Amit Bhandari off his next ball, ending the North innings and setting himself up for a hat-trick in the next game. This was a repeat of the first innings, in which Ganguly's guile with the ball ended another impressive VRV cameo of 46.

The true contest between the two -- VRV with ball and Ganguly with bat on a lively pitch -- ended with Ganguly comfortable winner, hitting the fast man's hostile short-pitched stuff out of the attack with vintage aggressive strokemaking.

The target of 128 was duly overtaken for the loss of one wicket, on the back of East batsman Saravanan's fluent 79.

Meanwhile, the puzzling phenomenon of the unusually green and bouncy track, a first for Rajkot, in a match that would have a significant impact on Ganguly's future may be explained by the fact that the Saurashtra Cricket Association belongs to a BCCI faction "opposed" to Jagmohan Dalmiya, seen as a "supporter" of Ganguly.

Such petty politics within a body charged with cricket administration, resulting in doctoring of pitches to hurt our own cricketers, is a despicable but now unsurprising trend. Another outrageous instance of it had happened recently when ahead of an India-Australia Test the Nagpur pitch was doctored by its own local cricket body opposed to Dalmiya, eventually helping Australia win the game on a pitch where they were far more at home than their hosts. This at a time when the series was in delicate balance, but this is apparently what we must now expect from infighting BCCI members all keen to wrest control of the body (and thus control of the enormous inflow of cash).

The same body that appears helplessly incapable of producing sporting pitches when the entire cricket infrastructure demands it, instead pandering to batsmen rather than give hard-working pacemen a fair chance, somehow miraculously finds the wherewithal to quickly change the nature of pitches when the goal is to hurt the careers of Indian cricketers. Shame on the BCCI, which owes the money it makes hand over fist to the efforts of the same cricketers.

But all credit to a legendary Indian cricketer who has risen phoenix-like once again despite all odds. No amount of pressure or political machinations by BCCI or Chappell can keep a top-class cricketer out of the team, and Indian fans can once again look forward to seeing one of the greatest ODI openers of all time back where he belongs: at the top of the Indian batting order.