'Would've been happy if we had taken lead'

There was an element of uncertainty when Manish Pandey walked in to bat at number five in the Ranji Trophy quarterfinals match between Karnataka and Saurashtra at the University of Saurashtra ground on a sunny Tuesday.

Karnataka were stranded at three for 112, chasing a mammoth 469, and given Pandey’s recent form, one didn’t expect him to stick around for long.

Striding out with his usual nonchalance, Pandey played out a few overs cautiously before launching into a huge six over long on off Dharmendrasinh Jadeja. There was no stopping the 23-year-old from there on. He piled on a spectacular 177 off 228 to help Karnataka reach 396 all out, also shrugging himself out of a rut that saw him score little over three hundred runs since the start of the season.

“Yeah, obviously it feels great. Probably if we would’ve got the lead at least… probably if another one had a partnership with me, someone pushing a little more, we might have gone through and this would have been a happy hundred rather than a not-so-happy hundred because of the situation we are in right now. But we have two more days, so let’s see how it goes,” said Pandey.

When asked if he did anything differently on the day, the stylish right-hander said: “I just had one thing on my mind and that if I get a fifty then I will carry on. One great thing that happened was that my team-mates didn’t cheer for my fifty. They didn’t let me know that I got my fifty and it helped me a little.”

Despite Pandey entertaining and saving Karnataka the blushes, he was running out of partners. That was until Abhimanyu Mithun arrived at the crease and added an important 80 runs for the eighth-wicket.

“Mithun is not a bad batsman at all. He has had partnerships with a lot of batsmen in the past. It was important for us to have a partnership, which we did.

“And obviously we were talking about how to go about it. We did a good job but probably if I had another partnership, probably with Appi (KP Appanna), may be thirty runs, it would’ve helped,” Pandey said ruefully.