Mumbai: God of Cricket Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar scored his 81st first class hundred and gave Mumbai a hope to give Rest of India (RoI) a good fight on day three of the Irani Cup at the Wankhede stadium on Friday. However Mumbai ended up their innings at the score of 409 in reply to RoI’s 526, as Sachin remained unbeaten on 140 of 197 balls.
With this hundred, he equalized Sunil Gavaskar’s record of maximum hundreds in the first-class matches by an Indian.
The Master Blaster remained unbeaten on a 140, and made sure that Mumbai don’t have to follow-on. He reached yet another milestone when scored 106th run of the innings and completed his 25,000 runs in first-class career. He achieved this feat in his 303rd first-class match. His 197-ball knock was studded with 18 boundaries and two huge sixes.
At the end of day’s play, Murali Vijay was batting alongside Sreesanth who came in as a night-watchman for rest of India after Shikhar Dhawan departed without scoring any runs.
However, despite Tendulkar’s sincere efforts, RoI still managed to get a healthy lead of 117 runs in the first innings. RoI’s bowlers made good use of the pitch and poor performance of Mumbai’s middle order was lead to their batting failure.
Earlier, resuming at their overnight score of 155 for two, the hosts lost night-watchman Shardul Thakur (4) very early in the day. Ishwar Pandey was the bowler who took his wicket.That was the moment when Sachin Tendulkar entered on the field and was applauded by the crowd. The Master Blaster and Ajinkya Rahane did very well to take Mumbai’s score up to the 200 mark.
When Sachin was busy in smashing the bowlers for fours and sixes, Harbhajan provided the much needed breakthrough and Rahane was adjudged leg before wicket. He was unfortunate to have been given out as he appeared to have hit the ball. Rahane scored nine boundaries and a six before getting out at the score of 83 runs in 183 balls. After Rahane’s dismissal, Rohit sharma came to bat and he departed after playing 12 balls.
Rohit Sharma was trapped by Harbhajan Singh in his top spinner and was caught by Pragyan Ojha at deep mid-wicket. Mumbai went into lunch at 255 for five in 73 overs.
But in the post lunch session, Mumbai had a shaky start and they lost Abhishek Nayar on the fourth ball after lunch. Ankeet Chavan came out to join Tendulkar and soon shifted his gears to fetch a couple of boundaries. The Master Blaster, meanwhile, continued to regale, being particularly severe on Ojha.
Tendulkar reached his 99 by playing a brilliant cover drive and then in the next over of Sreesanth, he guided his ball away to reach the three figure mark. The home team had reached 350 for six after the end of post-lunch session.
When the play got resumed after tea, Chavan started playing his strokes very freely. He did very well with Tendulkar to take Mumbai to a respectable total
Chavan and Tendulkar made 103 runs for the seventh wicket partnership before Chavan got out to Abhimanyu Mithun. Dhawal Kulkarni (10) and Junaid Khan (8) didn’t stayed on the crease for much longer and were sent back to pavilion by the spin-duo of Harbhajan and Ojha