Rohit takes Mumbai close to 38th Ranji title

Vinayak Samant 113 slammed his maiden first class century while teammate Rohit Sharma 108 struck his second of the match as Mumbai batted Uttar Pradesh out of the final and virtually assured itself of its 38th Ranji Trophy title here on Thursday Aware that their 157run first innings lead was enough to win the title in case of a drawn match Mumbai adopted a safetyfirst approach and batted on and on till they were all out for 367 UP would require a miracle of sorts to chase down the mammoth 525run target with just one day left The only sour note in Mumbais superior display was Sachin Tendulkars failure in both the innings The star batsman who scored a duck in the first innings and was battling a viral fever batted at number seven in the second essay only to score four runs and fall to Piyush Chawla Apart from Samant and Rohit captain Wasim Jaffer shone for Mumbai with the bat scoring 85 Rohit became only the sixth batsman to score two centuries in a Ranji Trophy final For UP Piyush Chawla and Parvinder Singh scalped three wickets apiece Resuming on 130 for no loss Mumbai soon realised that the UP bowlers were not in a mood to throw in the towel Bhuvneshwar Kumar removed Jaffer in the 43rd over just before the opening stand was about to reach the 150mark and suddenly wicket started tumbling as Mumbai from 146 for no loss slumped to 241 for six Chawla alone claimed the scalps of Abhishek Nayar 3 Ramesh Powar 0 and Tendulkar to peg Mumbai back before Rohit put his foot down Samant survived numerous edges and nearmisses but gamely hung on for his maiden century before falling to Parvinder Singh after a 239ball 113 that included 17 hits to the fence The middle order collapse apparently had no effect on Rohit who looked in complete control of the proceedings by the time UP took the second new ball Unlike the first innings Rohit was rock solid today He needed 27 balls to get off the mark but he kicked off in style hitting Chawla for three consecutive boundaries In fact he never allowed Chawla to settle into any rhythm often sweeping him to negate his googly Even though Mumbais lead kept swelling they never really seemed keen on an outright win and batted on and on Parvinder eventually dropped curtains on Rohits innings just before Mumbai reached the 350mark Rohits 146ball knock was studded with 17 crisp boundaries and a massive six off Praveen Gupta which also brought up his century Parvinder was on a hattrick as he removed Zaheer Khan for a first ball duck but Dhawal Kulkarni 15 denied him the feat Chawla finally dropped curtains on Mumbais second innings by removing Kulkarni