BENGALURU: It has not been a smooth ride for Karnataka in the knockout stages of the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. If they defeated Saurashtra in the last over of the pre-quarterfinals, Manish Pandey’s men edged past Bengal in the Super Over to reach the last four. To be fair, it is always difficult when a team loses key players after the group stages. Karnataka, however, won their last two matches without Mayank Agarwal, Devdutt Padikkal and K Gowtham, who are away due to India and India A duties.
Things are not going to get any easier against an unbeaten Vidarbha in the semifinals at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi on Saturday. Vidarbha might have easily topped the Plate group, but their impressive victories against Maharashtra and Rajasthan will keep them in good stead. More importantly, their batters, including Atharva Taide and Jitesh Sharma, who have both accumulated more than 200 runs so far. They also have Akshay Wadkar. The trio has been quite impressive of late.
Hence, Karnataka bowlers will have to be on top of their game against their opponents. As for the spinners, they look quite strong with the likes of KC Cariappa and J Suchith in their ranks. They have it in them to trouble the Vidarbha batters. But, there is lack of experience in the pace attack without Prasidh Krishna. For instance, Vijaykumar Vyshak, Vidhyadhar Patil and MB Darshan featured in the last game, and they have a combined experience of 11 T20 domestic matches. However, Vyshak, who has scalped seven wickets in the tournament, feels that their KSCA league and KPL experience in the past has helped them and is hopeful of a good show in the next game.
“There is always room for getting better every game. As a bowling unit, we have been doing well. We will take the positives and we have also looked at our bowling videos. We have seen what the areas we can improve upon are. We will obviously come back harder in the next game,” said Vyshak.
Talking about bowlers, Vidarbha will have their tails up after restricting Rajasthan to 84/8 in 20 overs in their last game. With the likes of Akshay Karnewar and Yash Thakur, who have taken 13 and 10 wickets respectively, they will be eager to carry on their solid form against Karnataka too. One can expect a good contest with Karnataka batters Pandey and Nair having shown good form in the competition. The duo will play an important role in the match. Even Rohan Kadam has got off to decent starts and Abhinav Manohar has proved to be a dangerous player with his big hitting abilities. They will be eager to make a mark in the big game and help Karnataka reach the final.