Abid Mushtaq took 9 for 99, and West Zone’s chase ended 6.3 overs into the final morning

West Zone needed 67 runs on the final morning at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. North Zone needed three wickets. Both dressing rooms had a reasonable case for optimism when they arrived, and the argument was over in 6.3 overs.

Abid Mushtaq settled it. The Jammu and Kashmir left-arm spinner struck with the second ball of the day, skidding one through Tanush Kotian’s defence and into middle stump, and finished the quarter-final with 9 for 99 across the two innings. North Zone won by 52 runs and go through to a semi-final against South Zone.

The morning that lasted 39 balls

Tushar Deshpande, who has a first-class hundred to his name, blocked 17 deliveries and then went at the 18th. Mushtaq’s drift from around the stumps did the rest, the edge carrying to Abdul Samad at slip. Three balls after that Urvil Patel went back to Nishant Sindhu’s left-arm spin and was given lbw for 25, a decision West might have overturned had they not already burnt their reviews.

That was the innings. West Zone all out 234, chasing 287, and a quarter-final they had been winning on the third evening was over before the first drinks break of the fourth morning.

Musheer and Gaikwad had it under control

The damage was done on Tuesday evening. Musheer Khan and Ruturaj Gaikwad put together a century stand and took West to 195 for 4, at which point the chase looked like a formality on any reasonable reading of the game. Musheer got to 96 and did not get to a hundred. Gaikwad made 66.

Then Mushtaq came back and West lost four wickets in the last half-hour of the day, closing on 220 for 7. Sides do not usually recover from an evening like that, and this one did not.

Twenty-five wickets to spin

The red-soil surface at the Centre of Excellence gave the finger-spinners everything, and 25 of the wickets in the match fell to them. West Zone had their own pair working it. Kotian took 4 for 72 in the first innings and 4 for 46 in the second, eight in the match, and Shams Mulani added 4 for 78. Neither of them ended up on the winning side, which is the sort of thing that happens when a game turns on 60-odd runs.

Arshdeep Singh was the other North Zone bowler worth watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with spin. This was his first red-ball match in almost a year and he took four wickets in it, three of them in the first innings, swinging it late in both directions at West’s top order.

North Zone’s runs came from an unlikely place

North were 161 for 7 in the first innings and heading for a deficit. Anshul Kamboj, their new-ball bowler, top-scored with 60 from No. 9 and dragged them to 251. He then removed Mulani and Kotian in quick succession with the old ball, and a side that had been seven down for 161 finished the second day 64 runs ahead.

Ayush Badoni made 51 and 50, a half-century in each innings, and North’s 222 the second time around gave Mushtaq something to bowl at. Deshpande took 4 for 57 in the first innings, so it is not as though West bowled badly. They kept running into totals that were 40 or 50 runs more than the pitch seemed to be offering.

Both semi-finals start on Sunday

North Zone play Tilak Varma’s South Zone in the first semi-final. East Zone, who beat North East Zone by an innings and 210 runs in the other quarter-final, meet Central Zone, the defending champions, with Rajat Patidar in charge. Both games start on 30 August at the same Bengaluru venue, on the same kind of surface, which suggests the spinners are not finished yet.

For West Zone it is a short tournament and a painful way to leave it. They had Gaikwad and Musheer batting as well as anyone in the match, they had Kotian taking eight wickets, and they still went out because a 29-year-old from Doda bowled left-arm spin nobody could get away for four days.

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