da pinnacle： Aided by a sedate 74 by Rajini Venugopal, Indian Railways completed aone sided eight wicket win over East Zone at the AC Tech ground in theCricInfo Rani Jhansi Trophy Women’s tournament in Chennai onFriday
Natarajan Sriram07-Apr-2000Aided by a sedate 74 by Rajini Venugopal, Indian Railways completed aone sided eight wicket win over East Zone at the AC Tech ground in theCricInfo Rani Jhansi Trophy Women’s tournament in Chennai onFriday. The match provided Railways with an an excellent opportunityto have some valuable match practice before they take on arch rivalsAir India in the title clash on Saturday.After restricting East to 146, Railways stared the run chase with alittle hiccup when Rajini Sharma was caught behind in the very firstover off Jhulan. Rajini Venugopal (74 runs off 107 balls) joinedBalbir Kaur and the two added 28 runs in 5.2 overs for the secondwicket. Balbir (7) was run out while trying to steal asingle. Hemalatha (42 runs off 88 balls) then joined Rajini. With twoearly wickets having fallen as a result of misjudgements, Rajni andHemalatha put their heads down and made sure of a Railways win.The pair moved steadily towards the target with a sedate partnershipwhich saw them capitalizing on some frequent lapses in thefield. Boundaries were far and few between since the two preferred topick up the runs by placing the ball into the gaps. The standflourished and with the East bowling not upto the mark, the two wereable to rotate the strike and kept the score ticking.Rajini in particular looked at ease against the spin attack of Sabari,Seema and Saswati. She made some crisp drives on both sides of thewicket. Rajini reached her half-century in 69 balls with the help ofsix boundaries. Then the two of them consolidated and helped the teamto close out the match in 35.2 overs with a 155 run unbroken stand off171 balls.Earlier, winning the toss, East Zone openers Neetu and Kavitha (58runs off 131 balls) failed to give a good start. Neetu was caughtbehind off Sunita when trying to go for an ambitious slash behindpoint. This brought Chandrabarti (29 runs off 106 balls) to thecrease. Both Chandrabarti and Kavitha resumed from where they had leftoff yesterday when they had shared a century stand against SouthZone. They showed good understanding in picking up the runs androtated the strike judiciously.But after the first drinks, the two spinners Rupanjali and Neetu Davidstarted to contain the two. Operating from the pavilion end, Neetuespecially made use of the uneven bounce and started to trouble thetwo batswomen. She managed to find the nick of Kavitha’s bat butRupanjali at gully dropped a simple chance. From the 20th overonwards, both Chandrabarti and Kavitha were tied down by some goodbowling from the spinners. They were not able to get the ball away forruns and the scoring rate dropped appreciably.Neetu and Deepa Kulkarni, operating in tandem, hardly gave anythingaway through to the 40th over. From the 20th to the 40th over, Eastcompiled only 40 runs. After a spell of 10 overs for nine runs withsix maidens from Neetu, East were pegged back by the fact that therewas not enough runs on the board and they were already in the last tenovers.The start of the 41st over saw Chandrabarti run out in trying to geton with the scoring. This brought Rumeli to the crease. Kavitha inthe meantime reached her second consecutive half century of thetournament. But her innings was cut short by a needless run out whenshe failed to reach the crease in trying to go for a non-existentsingle. Then Rumeli was bowled by Deepa while tring to punch the balloff the back foot. Geeta Samantrai and Jhulan took the score to 136 inthe 50th over, when the latter was run out. At the end of their 50overs, East managed to score only 146 for the loss of five wickets,mainly because of some good bowling by the Railways spin bowlers.