Confident Karnataka takes on Gujarat

Bengaluru: Watching the Karnataka Ranji Trophy team at practice is a delightful experience. There’s fun, frolic and laughter all around.

This cannot be misconstrued as lack of seriousness for it’s all about youthful exuberance, which augurs well for a team. The mood may be light, but the intentions are far from it.

Coming away with three points from a draw against Jharkhand in Mysore last week, the home team will resume their campaign on Thursday as they take on the vastly improved Gujarat in their second encounter of the season.

At the M. Chinnaswamy stadium here, R. Vinay Kumar and his men will be offered a sporting wicket, a strip the three-pronged attack which includes the skipper, Sreenath Arvind and Abhimanyu Mithun will hope to make the ball talk.

Having let Elite group debutants Jharkhand off the hook, Karnataka will leave nothing to chance as they take on a buoyant team. The visitors have a lot going for them, having started their campaign with an innings victory against Vidarbha and before collecting three points in the draw against Delhi.

Karnataka will go into the match seeking victory and will hope to ride on a good show by the pacers. Arvind, returning from injury and Mithun were impressive in the opening encounter with their disciplined line and length.

The same cannot be said about skipper Vinay, who was patchy. But given the Davanagere ace’s neversay-die attitude he will be raring to go for the jugular.

Following the painful experience of having given away a century of runs against Australia at the same venue a couple of weeks ago, Vinay finds himself out of the national squad for the one-dayers against West Indies later this month.

For a team which bats deep, the wicket will offer an opportunity for the young guns to show their batting mettle. Rookie Mayank Agarwal matched his aggression with sensibility during his debut 90 and will look to cement his place in the side, while the likes of Kunal Kapoor and Manish Pandey will look to convert decent numbers in the last contest into big scores.

With Robin Uthappa yet to recover from a hamstring injury, the hosts are likely to go in with the same eleven. On the other hand, after having a look at the wicket, Gujarat will look to change their bowling combination, adding a pacer and cutting their spin department to one man. The oung pace duo of Rush Kalaria and Jasprit Bumrah appear to be game-changers after a promising show against Vidharbha.

If they do go with one pacer, skipper Parthiv Patel will have to take a tough call as the toss up will be between left arm spinner Rakesh Dhruv who returned a hat-trick in Nagpur and his spin partner Akshar Patel who claimed seven wickets in Surat last week.

Their batting of course looks quite settled especially with the experience of Venugopal Rao and Patel.