East face uphill task to avoid follow-on

The Indian off-spinner should have had the wicket of Devang Gandhi in his very second delivery. But Dahiya failed to latch on to the catch to his right with the batsman just on five.

Parag Das, who survived a confident leg before decision against Vaneet Sharma earlier, played some confident shots later on. Basically a back-foot player, the Assam batsman played some neatly-struck boundaries to give confidence to himself and the team.

East Zone still require another 366 to make North bat again. The wicket has already shown signs of cracking with the odd ball jumping and a few keeping pretty low. East Zone batsmen?s tenacity and patience will be on test tomorrow.

Earlier, North Zone?s opening batsman Vikram Rathore added exactly a hundred this morning to his overnight 149 before playing a tired-looking stroke. His 249 – first double-hundred in the competition – contained 34 boundaries and a six and came in 528 minutes. He spent another 168 minutes at the crease today and put on 184 runs for the fourth wicket with Shafiq Khan.

Shafiq Khan (73: 180m, 9×4), Vijay Dahiya (76 not out: 150m, 10×4) and debutant Yashpal Singh (53 not out: 142m, 5×4) helped themselves to some big scores before Manhas applied the closure late in the second session, enabling Yashpal to reach his half-century. One felt the declaration should have come at least 30 minutes earlier so that the North bowlers could have had more overs to bowl at the batsmen this evening.