Rajat Patidar cut Sarfaraz Khan’s googly towards cover point to bring up Madhya Pradesh’s Ranji Trophy win at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore on Sunday. Aditya Shrivastava and co defeated 41-time champions Mumbai by six wickets in the final. 

Needing 108 runs on the last day, MP chased down the target in 29.5 overs. Opener Himanshu Mantri (37), Shubham Sharma (30) and Rajat Patidar (30) played handy knocks to cross the line for their state. 

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For Mumbai, Shams Mulani took three wickets and Dhawal Kulkarni had one against his name. 

In their second innings, Prithvi Shaw and co managed only 269  runs. Sarfaraz Khan (45), who finished the season with 18 short of 1000 runs and young Suved Parkar (51) tried their bit, but with the need to attack at every opportunity, MP’s Kumar Kartikeya (4/98) and the other bowlers knew that wickets would come their way.

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Rajat Patidar was the architect of MP’s 536 in the first innings after Mumbai had posted 374. The MP batter, who played for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in IPL 2022, scored 122 that had as many as 20 boundaries. His innings gave his side a 162-run massive first innings lead. 

Four hundreds have been scored by batters from either side but none oozed more class and competence than Patidar’s, who was in a league of his own when it came to regal drives on both sides of the wicket.

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“It is a great memory that I had left 23 years back (he lost the Ranji Trophy final as MP captain in 1998-99) and it is a blessing that I come back here, and winning this trophy was fabulous. It is emotional because I missed out as captain on the same ground. It is not a particular reason but I look for a challenging job where the teams are not doing well, there also should be youngsters and to develop that particular state,” MP coach Chandrakant Pandit said after the win.