Confident Tamil Nadu meets Baroda

Baba Aparajith-led Tamil Nadu, which headed into a two-week break with its first victory over Railways in Chennai, has 12 points after six fixtures. The southern state side is placed 14th in the combined Elite A and B rankings while Baroda, which has 14 points from six matches, finds itself three spots above Tamil Nadu.

With both teams sitting in the bottom half of the table, only an outright win can give them even a glimmer of a hope of making it to the next stage. D Vasu-coached Tamil Nadu has made three alterations to the squad, which competed against Railways. Abhishek Tanwar, K Vignesh and Jaganath Sinivas have been drafted into the set-up in place of Ravichandran Ashwin, youngster Pradosh Ranjan Paul and the injured T Natarajan.

Although Tamil Nadu will miss the services of ace offie R Ashwin, who is expected to board the plane to New Zealand for the long format series, it will be delighted with the form of left-arm spinners R Sai Kishore and M Siddharth, who ran riot with the ball against Railways.

The presence of experienced campaigners Abhinav Mukund and Dinesh Karthik also augurs well for the away side, which had a poor start to its campaign. Left-handed opening batsman Mukund is in good nick, having scored a stroke-filled century on his 100th Ranji Trophy appearance. His partner L Suryapprakash too did a neat job with the bat, making a half-century in the previous contest. While most of the runs have come from the top three batters in recent games, Vasu would want the middle-order, comprising skipper Aparajith, Baba Indrajith and Karthik, to come up with consistent showings.

After a good start to the season, the Kedar Devdhar-led Baroda has somewhat lost its way in its last three matches, drawing two and losing one. It will look to get back to winning ways when it faces a high-on-confidence Tamil Nadu on its own patch.

Baba Aparajith (captain), Abhinav Mukund (vice-captain), Dinesh Karthik, L Suryapprakash, Kaushik Gandhi, Baba Indrajith, Narayan Jagadeesan, R Sai Kishore, M Siddharth, Jaganath Sinivas, M Mohammed, Abhishek Tanwar, Ganga Sridhar Raju, K Mukunth and K Vignesh.