Pankaj Singh’s day started with a peach of a delivery. The good length ball pitched on the off-stump and moved away late to beat the Robin Uthappa’s tentative push. Unfortunately for Central Zone, Pankaj couldn’t come up with similar wicket-taking deliveries in the all-important morning session.

The tall pacer either strayed on to the pads or pitched the ball too wide. There were also several over-pitched ball that resulted in four boundaries. Figures of 7-2-22-0 prove that Pankaj didn’t make the new ball count. This resulted in the South Zone openers getting their eye in and scoring briskly on the easy paced pitch.

When Pankaj was taken off the attack, in the 18th over of the game, the scoreboard read impressive 65/0. The next time he was thrown the ball was in the 40th over and by then South had moved to 185/1.

This time Pankaj decided to attack the stumps, but the batsmen dealt with these deliveries without much trouble. Speaking about his tactics after the day’s play, Pankaj said, “It was a flat pitch. There was not much happening off the surface so I decided to attack the stumps. There was no point wasting deliveries around the off-stump which batsman would eventually leave. We wanted to make them play as much as we could but they played really well off the stumps.”

But it was a ball pitched on the fourth stump that got Pankaj his first wicket. The Rajasthan seamer bowled two deliveries around the off-stump corridor to Baba Aparajit and followed them with the one that angled in and straightened enough to find the edge.

Tasting success after 14 long overs, the tall seamer had a spring in his stride. He went on to scalp two more wickets. Suddenly, his figures went from 0/42 to 3/55. Interestingly, the plan that was laid out to get Rahul resulted in the wickets of Aparajith, Dinesh Karthik and Prasanna.

“We knew he (Rahul) was playing well off the stumps so we wanted to try something different for him. The plan basically was to get him out because the ball also started to reverse a bit. We wanted to do something with him because we knew it was that time of the day where there was a chance to pick a wicket or two,” revealed Pankaj.