Punjab hope for reversal of luck

Berhampur, March 12: Misfortune has been following Punjab as they have been badly affected in their last two Group-A Ranji Trophy Super League matches due to rain. First, they conceded first innings lead to a lowly Railways and then a depleted Mumbai proved good enough to take the crucial lead and seal any outside chance Punjab entertained, of making it to the last-eight stage. Thus they frittered away the advantage of playing at home.

Now, for their last engagement which commences at this border town, against Orissa, they failed to reach the venue according to the schudule. The Super Fast train which was supposed to carry them from Kharagpur was running indefinetly late, according to the information reaching here. The organisers, trifle worried over the abnormal delay, were hoping the Punjab team to land here by tonight.

On the other hand, Orissa, relatively a less experienced outfit on the donestic front, did reasonably well to exploit the home conditions to dump Railways in their earlier match to opentheir account on a creidtable note. They did suffer innings defeats at the hands of Mumbai and Karnataka but they were not expected to do better.

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As, Karnataka and Mumbai have already booked their berths in the quarterfinals, not much of importance can be attched to this contest.

TEAM

Orissa: BBCC Mohapatra, P Jayachandra, Pravanjan Mallick, Rashmi Ranjan Parida, Shiv Sundar Das (captain), Gautam Gopal (wk), Robin Morris, Ajay Barik, Sahid Khan, Sanjay Kumar Satpathy, Subhash Mohanty, Pradip Das, Yashpal Mohanty, Jagannath Das. Manager: Daniel Rout.

Umpires: Nagarajan (Goa) and Sudhir Asanani (Madhya Pradesh).

Match Referee: V Subramaniam (Kerala).