This has been Ronit More’s best season of first-class cricket and it is getting steadily better.
On Friday, the Karnataka medium-pacer claimed his fourth five-wicket haul of the season to drag his side back into this Ranji Trophy semifinal against Saurashtra. “It’s a very good feeling but the job is half done,” he said later. “There are three more wickets to go. We will come hard at them in the morning. We have to try and get the three wickets in the first one hour.”
The plan after lunch had been to bowl tight, More said. “The last ball before lunch, we got a wicket and the momentum shifted towards us. Pujara is the main batsman for their team and we wanted to get him out. So Mithun and I were talking about keeping it on the fourth stump and seeing what happened. Five to 10 balls were close calls but we couldn’t get a wicket at that time. We were just unlucky. That’s how the game works. Bowling in good areas is in our hands. Sometimes you get a wicket and sometimes you don’t.”
Saurashtra batsman Snell Patel was disappointed with the timing of his own dismissal. “It was very wrong to get out in a crunch situation — last ball before tea,” he said. “If I’d stayed there after tea, the situation would have been different. We played some bad shots; there was some good bowling too. But the game has not gone out of our hands yet.”
Meanwhile, K. Gowtham, who hurt his left knee while diving on the field and had to be stretchered off, was being assessed, the Karnataka team management said.