Middle-order fires to take Delhi to 318/6 on Day One

NEW DELHI: Young guns Nitish Rana (89) and Anuj Rawat (74) continued their good form as Delhi reached 318 for six against Railways at stumps on Day One of the Ranji Trophy Group A encounter. All rounder Mannan Sharma (68 n.o.) also got his second fifty in as many matches.

Rana and Rawat carried on from where they had left off against Assam in the opening encounter after Delhi’s top three -- Gautam Gambhir (2), Unmukt Chand (11) and Dhruv Shorey (16) --were out cheaply with scoreboard reading 44.

Nitish, who faced 145 balls hit 12 boundaries as he again peppered the off-side field with cut shots and some flowing drives on the on-side. Along with debutant Himmat Singh (45), Nitish added 109 runs for the fourth wicket.

Himmat, in fact came down the track to hit off-spinner Avinash Yadav in the second tier of the dressing room for a big six.

However Himmat missed a chance to score a debut half century when he was caught behind trying to cut Avinash. After his impressive debut, Rawat looked more assured alongside Rana,

playing both cuts and drives on the off-side. As Nitish was looking good for his second hundred, he came down the track to a flighted delivery from Shivakant (Smit Patel 99, Yashpal Singh

96; K Vignesh 2/ 36) v Tamil

Nadu.

Indore: Madhya Pradesh 250/ 5 in 89 overs (Naman Ojha 99*, Ankit Sharma 63*, Wasim Ahmed 40; Akash Parkar 2/48) v Mumbai. Vadodara: Baroda 247/7 in 90 overs (Kedar Devdhar 93, Vishnu Solanki 60, Swapnil K Singh 30*, B Ayyappa 3/ 46) v Andhra Pradesh. Shukla to be stumped 11 short of three figure mark. Rawat and Mannan batted with ease. The low bounce of the pitch and slowness made it easy to adjust.