Jaipur: Vineet Saxena, who captained Rajasthan in the absence of regular skipper Hrishikesh Kanitkar, has said not having a specialist spinner hurt them in their Ranji Trophy game against Madhya Pradesh, which ended in a draw with Rajasthan securing three points on the basis of getting the first innings lead.
"The lack of specialist spinner had really hurt us. If we had got one [specialist spinner] than we could have come out with an outright win from this match," Vineet said after the end of the final day's play at the KL Saina Stadium here. We are disappointed as we could have got from points from this game.
Rajasthan, who looked promising to secure an outright win after dismissing MP for just 256, could only manage a lead of 123 runs in their first innings. And they were denied further by some resolute batting by the MP batsmen in their second innings, with Naman Ojha scoring a century and Jalaj Saxena contributing with an unbeaten 76. The two MP batsmen helped the team to reach 466 for 6 before they asked the hosts to chase an unlikely target of 344 in the last session of the day.
Vineet although appreciated the performance of his team's pacemen, Rituraj Singh and Pankaj Singh - who took four wickets each in the first innings and shared two wickets apiece in the second innings, he said expecting them to get all the wickets in the second innings as well
04:30 PM, Jul 21, 2008
