New Delhi:Bengal batters Sudip Gharami, Anustup Majumdar and seven others' names have now been etched in the annals of world cricketing history. During their Ranji Trophy quarter-final against Jharkhand, the Bengal batters made the full use of belter dished out to them, and went on to erase the previous world record set in the Australian first-class cricket way back in 1893.
It's 129 summers ago, the Oxford and Cambridge past and present team locked horns with Australia in a first-class fixture in which the latter clobbered through the field to score 833. In 833, as many as eight batters scored 50-plus to create a record that stayed intact till Wednesday morning. But not anymore. Now, nine Bengal batters have scored 50-plus runs to glide them to a mammoth 773 for 7 soon after lunch on Day Three on Wednesday. The herculean effort included tons from Gharami (186) and Majumdar (117).
The Bengal scorecard was a bowler's nightmare. Abhishek Raman (61), Abhimanyu Easwaran (65), Sudip Gharami (186), A Majumdar (117), Manoj Tiwary (73), Abhishek Porel (68), Shahbaz Ahmed (78), Sayan Mondal (53*) and Akash Deep (53*) all scored fifty-plus scores. The show with the willow seems to have excited the past greats of Bengal cricket. Sambaran Banerjee, Arun Lal and Ashok Malhotra were instrumental in Bengal winning their last Ranji Trophy title back in 1989-90. Banerjee was the skipper with Lal and Malhotra contributing handsomely to bring the coveted trophy home.
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