East Zone holds on against South Zone in the Duleep Trophy final. On the third day of the match, South Zone’s innings faltered in response to East Zone’s first innings score of 708. Half of the South Zone team has returned to the pavilion within 200. Devdutt Padikal scored a half-century. He played an inning of 62 runs.
Apart from Padikal, Narayan Jagadeesan scored 32 runs and Sheikh Rasheed scored 27 runs. Shreyas Gopal was out after scoring 26 runs. Captain Tilak Verma is present at the crease after scoring 56 runs. By the end of the third day’s play, South Zone had scored 242 runs at the loss of 6 wickets. Now the entire responsibility of the team rests on captain Tilak Verma. His effort will be to save the team from follow-on by playing long innings on the fourth day. However, now South Zone does not have much batting available. South Zone will have to score 350 runs more to avoid follow-on.
East Zone performed brilliantly batting first at Chepauk ground. After this, he performed tremendously in bowling also. In the fast bowling of East Zone, the pair of Mohammed Shami and Mukesh Kumar gave the initial shocks to South Zone. The team could not recover from this and half the team returned to the pavilion at the score of 174. Shami and Mukesh Kumar both took 2-2 wickets. Shikhar Mohan and Mohammad Qureshi got one wicket each.
Earlier, East Zone had made a huge score of 708 runs. In which captain Ishan Kishan played an excellent inning of 270 runs. Apart from him, Kumar Kushagra also scored a century. Shikhar Mohan scored 85 runs. Among the opening batsmen, Vaibhav Suryavanshi scored 44 runs and Abhimanyu Easwaran scored 72 runs. Whereas in the lower order, Ankul Roy played an inning of 45 runs and Mohammad Qureshi played an inning of 40 runs. Whereas, from South Zone, Tripurna Vijay took 4 wickets while Chama Milind and Shreyas Gopal took 2 wickets each.