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New Delhi: South Zone headed into the final day of the 2014/15 Duleep Trophy final against Central Zone with 117 runs to win and with nine wickets in hand.
However, the slow and low nature of the Feroz Shah Kotla pitch produced the best cricket of the match. After Lokesh Rahul's century and Baba Aparajith's fifty, South's middle-order crumbled to the spinners as they were bowled out for 291 to lose the final by just nine runs to hand Central Zone an unlikely victory.
Central would not have even dreamt of this kind of a turnaround. It was started by Pankaj Singh and sustained by the spinners as South lost the plot losing nine wickets for just 107 runs.
Central Zone were buoyed by performances from Ali Murtaza (3/59), Piyush Chawla (3/83) and Jalaj Saxena (2/44) as they exploited the variable bounce of the pitch to make a match out of nothing and lead their team to a memorable victory.
The first session saw South Zone losing seven wickets for 96 runs. At the start of the second session, Shreyas Gopal was the only recognised batsman left for South Zone as they needed 21 runs with just three wickets in hand.
However, Gopal could not handle the accuracy and he was cleaned up by Murtaza for 12. Coming into bat at 260 for 6, Gopal got some streaky shots and was also able to put the bad balls away, but with wickets falling at the other end the 21-year-old too succumbed to the pressure.
Pankaj Singh started the shift in momentum by snapping up the big wicket of KL Rahul, who added only nine runs to his overnight score of 121, in the sixth over of the day with an incoming delivery for 130; and as Rahul had suggested that playing on a day five Kotla track would be challenging for new batsmen, South crumbled remarkably.
Brief scores
Central Zone - 276 (Bist 79) and 403 (Bist 112*, Fazal 72, Saxena 71, Gopal 4-60)
South Zone - 379 (Rahul 185, Uthappa 80, Vihari 75, Murtaza 4-59) and 291 (Rahul 130, Aparajith 56, Chawla 3-83, Murtaza 3-59)
Result - Centrali Zone won by 9 runs
MOM - Lokesh Rahul (South Zone)
