Ojha stars in Bengal's first win of season

Left-arm spinner Pragyan Ojha spun Bengal to their maiden victory this season as his career-best match haul of 11 wickets helped the hosts outplay Vidarbha by 105 runs in the Group A Ranji Trophy cricket match, which witnessed an intense finish, here today.
Chasing a stiff 297, Vidarbha almost saw the day through with a valiant 96 from Ganesh Satish (11x4, 1x6) but the new Bengal recruit trapped him LBW with a ball that stayed low en route to 4-60 in the second innings to make it 183 for nine in the last ball of 82nd over.
With light fading fast and Bengal needing the last wicket, two catches were dropped to add more drama in the fag end of the fourth and final day.

But before it could go out of their hands Veer Pratap Singh (3-23), who had given the first two breakthroughs in the day, sealed the win dismissing Ravikumar Thakur to spark early Diwali celebrations in the hosts camp.
Having defeated the team, which was placed second before the match, Bengal thus opened up the table to jump to top four and brighten their last-eight hopes, while Vidarbha dropped to fifth.
Bengal are now ahead of Vidarbha and behind third-placed Assam on net run-rate as all the three teams have 16 points, while Delhi (24) and reigning champions Karnataka (21) occupy top two in the standings.

Man of the Match Ojha, who has had a quiet season for his new team so far, made it memorable at the Jadavpur University second campus ground in Salt lake as he made all the difference in the bowling unit, en route to his career-best 11-118 in Ranji Trophy.

In first-class cricket, this was his third 10th wicket match haul and first in Ranji Trophy with the other two coming in Test and a county for Surrey.
Earlier Veer Pratap gave the first breakthroughs dismissing Wasim Jaffer (three) and Faiz Fazal (nine) before Satish stitched 67 with Subramaniam Badrinath (31).

But before they could make it big, Ojha gave twin blows in Badrinath and Shalabh Shrivastava (1) in successive overs, while Ashok Dinda made it 85 for five at lunch castling Shrikant Wagh for a duck.