BENGALURU, The Cheteshwar Pujara juggernaut continued to roll and the run-machine steered Saurashtra to the Ranji Trophy finals with a five-wicket victory over Karnataka in the semi-finals here on Monday.<\/p>\n
Saurashtra will now meet defending champions Vidarbha in the final to be played from February 3-7 in Jaipur. This is the third time that Saurashtra will be playing the finals.<\/p>\n
Pujara remained unbeaten at 131 off 266 balls and added 214 runs with senior player Sheldon Jackson (100) to anchor another successful run-chase for Saurashtra.<\/p>\n
Needing 55 runs on the final day, it was a mere formality as Jackson duly completed his 16th first-class century.<\/p>\n
Although they had seven wickets in hand, Pujara didn’t take any undue risks and it took 17.4 overs for Saurashtra to score the remaining 55 runs.<\/p>\n
Vinay Kumar (3\/75), who bowled his heart out and was unlucky after Pujara was ruled not out by the on-field umpire despite a clear edge when he was on 32, got the consolation wicket of Jackson. However, the match was as good as over by then.<\/p>\n
Pujara’s innings had 17 boundaries while Jackson struck 15 hits to the fence.<\/p>\n
The best part about Pujara’s innings was his intensity. After his most defining away tour for India in Australia, the 31-year-old looked like continuing from his century in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
His sequence of scores since the start of the Australia series now reads 123, 71, 24, 4, 106, 0, 193, 11, 67 not out, 45 and 131 not out.<\/p>\n
Pujara did get a couple of lucky reprieves in this match but it could be blamed on the umpiring standards which have been below par during the season.<\/p>\n
Umpire Saiyed Khalid, who had a forgettable outing, is expected to get negative marking and will certainly be demoted to a lower grade during the next season if well-placed sources in the BCCI are to be believed.<\/p>\n
His howler did affect Karnataka’s chances but to Pujara’s credit, the controversy hardly perturbed him and it was business as usual for him.<\/p>\n
His zen-like approach was at a different level, with his only mission being to take Saurashtra to the summit clash.<\/p>\n
A testimony to his unflappable temperament was that the “cheater cheater” boos by the home team supporters didn’t unsettle him.<\/p>\n
In the end, it was mission accomplished for Indian cricket’s man of the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BENGALURU, The Cheteshwar Pujara juggernaut continued to roll and the run-machine steered Saurashtra to the Ranji Trophy finals with a five-wicket victory over Karnataka in the semi-finals here on Monday. Saurashtra will now meet defending champions Vidarbha in the final to be played from February 3-7 in Jaipur. This is the third time that Saurashtra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2527","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2529,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/2529"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}