Vishakhapatnam: Manprit Juneja couldn’t make the most of the golden opportunity of slamming a double hundred in the second and final unofficial test against New Zealand A as he was dismissed for 193 when Mark Gillespie got him caught by Corey Anderson here on Thursday. India fell short by seven runs in their first innings as they were bundled up for 430.
Gillespie ended up with the impressive figures of 4/80 whereas Doug Bracewell took 3 for 88.
It was expected that the match would end in a draw and it panned out exactly the same way as the Kiwi batsmen scored 3/176 of the 51.2 overs that they batted. Carl Cachopa and Tom Latham did slam half-centuries for their team and it was their sensible play which allowed them to add 128 runs in 37 overs and also get some match practice for the upcoming ODIs that they will be playing against India A in the interval of just a couple of days.
India added just 22 runs to the overnight score of 408. Gillespie came up with the good variety of deliveries to first scalp the wicket of Dhawal Kulkarni, who scored 10 runs, and then went onto remove Juneja and Imtiaz Ahmed.
Meanwhile, the second innings of New Zealand A, didn’t get to a pretty start which they were looking for, as they lost their first wicket in Neil Broom, who didn’t contribute any runs to the total and was undone by Kulkarni.
But Latham and Cachopa were in no mood to miss this opportunity of scoring some runs. They grilled the Indian bowlers with their 128-run stand, which was finally broken by the leg-arm spinner Rakesh Dhurv by trapping Kiwi skipper Latham in front of the wickets. Latham scored 61 off 100 balls that he played and his knock was studded with seven crisp boundaries.
Dhurv claimed the wicket of Cachopa in his very next over to reduce the visitors to 3/139. But the result seemed to be a far-fetched idea by that time. Dhurv ended up with the decent figures of 2/45 after the 14 overs that he bowled in the second innings.
Brief Scores:
New Zealand A 437 & 176/3 (Tom Latham 61, Carl Cachopa 76, Rakesh Dhurv 2/45)
India A 430 (Manprit Juneja 193, Vasudevan Jagadeesh 91, Abhishek Nayar 58, Mark Gillespie 4/80, Doug Bracewell 3/88).
