UP to clash with Mumbai today in semifinal of Col CK Nayudu Trophy

Kanpur: A keen tussle is on the cards when UP will clash with Mumbai in the semifinal of U-23 cricket tournament for Col CK Nayudu trophy at the Green Park stadium on Sunday.The host team will have an advantage of playing this match at their home ground before their own cricket fans. The best part is that they are well acclimatized with the local climatic conditions. On the other hand, The Mumbai team reached the city a couple of days ago. UP in the quarterfinals had outplayed Saurashtra while Mumbai had defeated Railway in another quarter final. Talking to TOI Mohd Amir, coach of UP team, said that all the players are fit and their morale is high. They are eager to perform their best against Mumbai and break the jinx that Mumbai is invincible.UP’s batting revolves around captain Sameer Rizvi who had scored a triple century against Saurashtra in the quarterfinal. Aradhya, Aditya,Kritagya KK Singh, Vipraj Nigam, Swastik Chikara and Prashant Veer have centuries under their belt. .Kritagya KK Singh though failed in the quarterfinal to play a big innings but in an earlier match he had not only scored runs but also bagged wickets.In bowling, Vipraj Nigam, Prashant Veer, Kunal Tyagi and Aqib Khan are among the wickets.Mumbai’s batting banks on Divyanshu, Suved Parkar, Harsh Jadhav, captain Atharva Vinod Ankolekar. Divyanshu and Suved Parkar had scored centuries against Railways and Bihar captain Atharva though failed to score centuries but he contributed his share with bat. However, he has emerged as the most successful bowler claiming 17 wickets in the last two matches. He bagged 14 wickets against Bihar. Himanshu Singh too had bagged 13 wickets in the last two matches.UP coach Amir said that a few guest players were very much experienced and were performing very well. His bowlers had to get rid of them at the earliest to take a stronghold in the match.Green Park wicket appears to be a good batting wicket, and the team winning the toss would prefer to bat first on the track which has a little grass.UPCA has announced its 18- member team for this tie. The members are:Sameer Rizvi, Rituraj Sharma, Siddharth Yadav, Aditya Sharma, Aaradhya Yadav, Swastik Chikara, Kritagya KK Singh, Kunal Tyagi, Vaibhav Chaudhary, Parth Jain, Rohit Dwivedi, Vijay Kumar, Vipraj Nigam, Osho Mohan, Shiven Malhotra, Prateek Pandey, Shubham Mishra and Aqib Khan.