Bengal mentor Arun Lal said the format for the Ranji Trophy is flawed. Before you accuse him of sour grapes because Bengal may not qualify for the quarter-finals, it needs to be mentioned that Lal has been the team’s most vocal critic through the season.
“This is a six-point-per-game competition and so, some dozen matches have been decided in three days with teams getting out for 35 and 100. Evidently because of soil conditions, we can’t prepare rank turners,” said Lal after stumps on the third day of Bengal’s Elite Group B tie at Jadavpur University Salt Lake campus on Wednesday.
“So, some teams are making wickets that look like kabaddi ‘akharas’ (pits) and we can’t do that. That is unfair on teams not getting that chance. So, some teams are getting to 30, 32 points and we can’t,” he said.
“I think within this framework, an outright win should fetch five points, not six and there should be no system of bonus point. Or make it five-day cricket because then the true worth of a team comes out,” he said.
Seen exhorting Abhimanyu Easwaran and Manoj Tiwary through the second and final sessions, Lal admitted Bengal under-performed with bat and ball. He criticised Bengal’s inability to prise out the last wicket for the second consecutive game, saying it seemed “they lacked ideas in the field.” And he said scoring only five hundreds in a season, three of them from Easwaran, wasn’t good enough. “About 15 would have been par,” said Lal.
{{/usCountry}}Seen exhorting Abhimanyu Easwaran and Manoj Tiwary through the second and final sessions, Lal admitted Bengal under-performed with bat and ball. He criticised Bengal’s inability to prise out the last wicket for the second consecutive game, saying it seemed “they lacked ideas in the field.” And he said scoring only five hundreds in a season, three of them from Easwaran, wasn’t good enough. “About 15 would have been par,” said Lal.
{{/usCountry}}Bengal were underprepared going into the Ranji Trophy this term, he said. “We were also not as fit as we should have been.”