The two teams that have played consistent cricket from the first week of November have qualified for the final of the Vijay Hazare Trophy.
Defending champion Karnataka may have been a trifle lucky to have got past a plucky Bengal in the semifinals on Saturday, but R. Vinay Kumar’s team has not lost a single match this season. It beat Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad, Andhra and Goa to win the K.S. Subbaiah Pillai Trophy. Its match against Kerala was washed out.
Punjab began its one-day campaign in Himachal Pradesh losing to Haryana and Delhi. But since the defeat to Delhi, Harbhajan Singh’s team has won six matches in a row, including the three knock-out matches played at Rajkot, Baroda and here, and now finds itself in the final challenging Karnataka.
In the semifinals, Punjab played cautious cricket and utilised nearly 49 overs to cross 238 to dash Odisha’s hopes. Amitoze Singh, who has turned out to be the highest run-getter (376), secured the match for Punjab batting for one and half hours.
There has been a change in the Karnataka top and middle order batting in recent times; a handful of them have opted to play for Kerala and Vidarbha.
The team’s batting fortunes have revolved around the likes of Robin Uthappa, Manish Pandey, Stuart Binny and Karun Nair. They usually approach batting with aggressive intent, but against Bengal, the anxiety to put up a formidable total made them somewhat diffident.
Karnataka made two changes for the semifinal; it dropped leg spinner Shreyas Gopal (three matches, one for 106) and left-arm seamer Srinath Aravind (two matches, six for 114) and played Ravikumar Samarth and left-arm spinner Abrar Kazi. Kazi, though, is carrying a vulnerable hamstring.
Seamer Sandeep Sharma is likely to replace Deepak Bansal in the Punjab team for the final, slated to start at 2.30 p.m.
