India Blue pacers break India Green's backbone to put team in driver's seat
Greater Noida: There are two kinds of players –those who have flair and others who are workhorses. Pankaj Singh and Abhimanyu Mithun are very similar sort of bowlers and fall in the second category. Both are tall, hit the deck hard and so far their cricket careers have also been pretty similar.
Abhimanyu Mithun in action during the 2013 Irani Cup in Mumbai. Pic/mid-day archives
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Pankaj who represents Rajasthan has played 92 first class games while Mithun from Karnataka has 73 first class caps. At the international level the former has two Test caps while the latter has four.
Despite not being on selectors' radar that has never stopped the pacers from giving it cent percent. The latest being their combined show for India Blue against India Green on the Day Three of the Duleep Trophy game between India Blue and India Green.
On a pitch where in the first innings their team posted 707 runs batting for two days, it appeared like that the Blue bowlers would also have a tough time bowling with a pink ball, an opportunity they never got in their first rain-truncated game.
Vijay's rash shot
After Green opener Murali Vijay played a rash shot to gift his wicket early to leg spinner Karan Sharma who finished with three, it was the Singh-Mithun show that never quite let the Green batsmen come back in the game, which guaranteed the Blue a place in the final.
Pankaj Singh
On Tuesday the two pitched the ball in the corridor of uncertainty making the batsman play as much as possible and shared five wickets in 19 of the total 61 overs bowled by Blue. The Karnataka pacer was the first among the two to get a wicket.
Green collapse
Singh got a set Robin Uthappa in similar fashion. Shreyas Gopal followed the pattern of dismissal to give Mithun his second scalp. Singh got Parthiv Patel adjudged leg before wicket and Ashok Dinda fell in the slips to Mithun.
The effort without achieving any personal milestones was special because the third-day track, if anything had help only for the spinners and looked good for batting. This was reason why Blue skipper Gautam Gambhir didn't ask Suresh Raina's team to follow on despite dismissing them in just over two sessions and with a lead of 470 runs and adding another 85 runs for no loss in their second innings with just a day's play left. While this show might not earn the two pacers a Test recall in the near future it certainly earned them a lot of respect.
Brief scores
India Blue 707 and 85-0 (M Agarwal 49*) vs India Green 237 (P Patel 55, S Raina 52; A Mithun 3-16, K Sharma 3-74; P Singh 2-54)
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