On This Day in 2018: Vidarbha win their maiden Ranji Trophy title by beating Delhi in Indore

The first day of 2018 witnessed a new Ranji Trophy title holder in the form of Vidarbha. They won their maiden title by beating Delhi at Indore under the leadership of Faiz Fazal.

Fazal had won the toss and chose to field first and Vidarbha were up against a strong Delhi batting lineup which consisted of stars like Gautam Gambhir, Rishabh Pant, and Nitish Rana. However, they were to be surprised by the incredible spell of pace bowling by Rajneesh Gurbani who took a hat-trick in the first innings and had incredible figures of 6/59. Despite the solid effort from Dhruv Shorey who scored 145 from 294 deliveries the team could only manage to put 295 on the board.

The Vidarbha batters also made sure that Gurbani’s efforts didn’t go to waste. There were crucial knocks from Fazal (67 off 101), Wasim Jaffer (78 of 150), Aditya Sarwate (79 off 154), and Siddhesh Niral (74 off 107) along with an incredible century from Akshay Wadkar (133 off 262) to take the score to 547 and get a healthy lead of 252 going into the second innings.

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The Delhi batters did produce a few decent knocks once again from Shorey who scored 62 from 142 deliveries and Nitish Rana (64 off 113) but in the end, they were finally bowled out for 280 and could only manage to set a target of just 29 runs which Vidarbha chased down easily, winning the game by nine wickets in the end.

It was Rajneesh Gurbani who got the Player of the Match award for taking eight wickets in the game. This was a great underdog story in domestic cricket which did not only end there as Vidarbha also went on to retain the title in the following season, becoming only the sixth team in the Ranji Trophy to do that.