Even as the action has heated up in Nagpur and the Border-Gavaskar Trophy is coming to an exciting conclusion today, the 2nd round of Ranji matches begin around the country.
TN take on Karnataka in Bangalore in a renewal of a very old and long rivalry. Last year young Abhinav Mukund, playing his first Ranji season scored a memorable hundred, but things promise to be different this year. The HIndu reports that S Badrinath is likely to join the team. I am not too sure because I thought I saw him warming the bench at Nagpur yesterday.
Maharashtra take on Andhra in Nashik. This report says that Maharashtra is weakened by 4 of its players away in Pun playing in the under 22 competition! I don’t understand how an under 22 competition could get bigger than the Ranji Trophy. Maybe the success of the Indian u 19 team and the subsequent attention that the stars of that team got, prompted Maharashtra authorities to concentrate on that as aopposed to playing the rpemier domestic competition in the country.
Delhi v Hyderabad, Gujarat v Mumbai (Rohit Sharma not playing), UP (Suresh Raina not playing) v Baroda (without Yusuf Pathan), Punjab (without Yuvraj) v Rajastan, Saurashtra v Orissa are the other matches beginning today.
Thanks to some of the visitor of this blog who wrote to cricinfo about the apalling lack of coverage of the Ranji 1st round matches. This wa the response from cricinfo
We apologise for not carrying these scores but we have been refused permission by the BCCI
from carrying live updates. we will have end-of-day scorecards as soon after the close as possible.
Please keep track of the below given link for the end-of-day scorecard details:
http://www.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/2008-09/IND_LOCAL/
Hopefully we can access the scorecards at the end of the day at the above link. Cricinfo atleast has a nice preview for all the matches this time. Meanwhile there is also a Plate league in the Ranji trophy that is happening. The enws of national interest is that Sreesanth is still injured and has not been included in the Kerala team for the 1st two rounds.
Sanjay
I still dont understand why BCCI cant allow cricinfo to post live scores of ranji matches.
Cant also understand why there was nothing on the front page of cricinfo too..
Sreesanth is still injured – but having b’day bashes and breaking walls in his apratment complex in B’luru
When it was known that Badrinath would not be playing for India in Nagpur, why wasn’t he released for the Ranji game ?