Karnataka just about hold out Vidarbha to enter finals of Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy

Tight finishes have started becoming a thing for the Karnataka T20 team after they once again won a closely fought game to enter the finals of the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.

Playing the semi finals of the 2021 edition, Karnataka sneaked past the opponents to win the game by four runs at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on Saturday 20 November.

Defending a decent total of 177, Karnataka were put in a spot of bother after the Vidarbha batters took on the Karnataka bowling attack and added 43 runs for the first wicket in just 5 overs.

The attacking game continued from the Vidarbha batsmen but they kept losing wickets in regular intervals failing to convert their starts. Vidarbha’s entire batting order were among runs, but it was the brilliance of KC Cariappa that brought Karnataka back into the game. He bowled the tough overs and dismissed two of Vidarbha’s most attacking batsmen in opener Atharva Taide (32 off 16) and Shubham Dubey (24 off 16). He gave Karnataka their first victory by breaking the opening pair in the penultimate over of the powerplay and bagged the wicket of Dubey right after the break to halt the batting side’s momentum.

Even with Cariappa’s spell of four overs, things had to be capped off at the back end of the innings, and a lovely 19th over from Vyshak Vijay Kumar rose up to the occasion and mixed his lines and lengths to keep the batsmen quiet. 

Despite his good work he did get hit for a six and a four in that over which brought down the equation to 14 off the last over, a fairly gettable total at that point of the game.

However, right arm medium pacer Vidhyadhar Patil sealed off the game picking the much needed wicket of Akshay Karnewar in the first ball of the final over. 

From there, it was just about keep the head on the shoulders, and Patil did that without any problems.

Earlier in the day, Karnataka rode on their top three to post a huge total in a crunch game. The hitting was led by Rohan Kadam who was dropped in the very first over of the game by Virdarbha’s captain Apoorv Wadkar behind the stumps. Kadam went on to post 87 off 56 balls and was aided by Manish Pandey (54 off 42) and Abhinav Manohar who played an attacking 27 off 13 late in the innings. Darsham Nalkande was the pick among the bowlers as he picked up four wickets in four balls in the final over of the game.

With that, Karnataka have now set up a reverse fixture of the 2019 final against Tamil Nadu where the former won the game in the tightest margins of one run.