ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2018

but instead, they ground out a total of 313 and set their opponents a testing victory target of 198. It proved just enough as Vidarbha, led by medium-pacer Rajneesh Gurbani with 7-68 (12-162 in the match), snatched a win by 5 runs to reach the first Ranji final in their history. Their opponents were Group A runners-up Delhi, who had had to fight hard to get past Group C champions Madhya Pradesh in the quarterfinals but had then cruised to an easy three-day semifinal win over Bengal. In the final, Gurbani continued his heroics for Vidarbha with 6-59, including a hat-trick (only the second in a Ranji final) as Delhi, put in to bat, were dismissed for 295. This looked like it might be a competitive score when Vidarbha’s sixth wicket fell at 246 in reply; but the next two wickets added 169 and 132 as wicketkeeper Akshay Wadkar, in his first season, chose this juncture to hit his maiden century. The eventual lead was 252 and from this there was no way back for Delhi, Vidarbha easing home by nine wickets. Finally in the drawn Irani Cup game in March, in the last match of the season, Vidarbha further emphasized their quality by running up an imposing total of 800-7d against a Rest of India side that included Ravi Ashwin. Apart from the Ranji Trophy and Irani Cup, the only other first-class matches were the Tests against Sri Lanka, noted above, and, at the very start of the season, the Duleep Trophy and two matches by New Zealand’s A side. The Duleep, again played between select sides, was comfortably won by India Red, who secured the only outright win at the league stage before beating India Blue in the final. It overlapped with the two games played by the New Zealand side against India A, both won by an innings by the home side. Leggie Karn Sharma excelled in these early-season games, in which he made four appearances and claimed 31 wickets; but he was to do little thereafter. Perhaps the outstanding individual feat of the season was that of Mayank Agarwal of Karnataka, who in the month of November 2017 hit scores of 304*, 176, 23, 90, 133*, 174 and 134. The total of 1033, average 206.60, made him only the second player to make a thousand first-class runs in a calendar month outside England, the sole previous instance being 1146 runs by Bill Ponsford in December 1927. It was largely on the strength of this Bradmanesque streak – he reached fifty on only one other occasion – that Agarwal topped the season’s batting aggregates with 1171 at 97.58. Hanuma Vihari of Andhra, with 1056 at 96.00, and Vidarbha’s left-hander Faiz Fazal, with 1001 at 71.50, were the only other batsmen to pass a thousand runs. No bowler claimed fifty wickets: Karn Sharma’s leg-breaks came nearest, with 45 at 20.84. A one-Test wonder from 2014/15, he had joined Vidarbha from Railways, but after his early-season purple patch in the Duleep and against New Zealand A he contributed only 14 wickets to his new team’s successful Ranji campaign. Jalaj Saxena, the former Madhya Pradesh off-spinner who turned out for Kerala in 2017/18 after missing 2016/17 entirely, was second in the national aggregates with 44 wickets at 17.11, all of them in the Ranji Trophy. (JCB) Abandoned Matches: Hyderabad v Maharashtra, Gymkhana Ground, Secunderabad, 6, 7, 8, 9 October. Hyderabad v Uttar Pradesh, Gymkhana Ground, Secunderabad, 14, 15, 16, 17 October. Duleep Trophy 2017/18: Final table P W L DWF DLF ND A BP Pts NetRRN 6 0 3 1 1 1 1 India Red 2 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 7 -0.091 2 India Blue 2 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 4 0.228 3 India Green 2 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 -0.118 FINAL: India Red beat India Blue by 163 runs. 146 India in 2017/18