Nayar almost wins it for hosts

MUMBAI: Wriddhiman Saha (38*) gatecrashed Abhishek Nayar's party (6-13 ) to deny Mumbai an outright victory and three bonus points on Tuesday. Nayar displayed a fine art of seam bowling, but failed to bowl out Bengal who hung on to force an enthralling draw. Resuming from their overnight score of 47 for 0, the visitors finished the fourth and final day on 198 for 7. Mumbai took home three points to take their points tally to 10.
Fortunes swung for Mumbai after lunch when Nayar bowled a dream spell of 8-4-10-3. The Mumbai all-rounder seemed unplayable as he got the cherry to move both ways off the deck. With a reduced run-up and a change in his bowling action, Nayar whipped up pace and got the batsmen in two minds. The classic example was the dismissal of Manoj Tiwary. Nayar mixed it up to confuse the Bengal skipper and rattle his woodwork.
"I set him up. He was playing for something else. I thought I could try an inswinger because he was expecting an outswiger. The ball was doing quite a bit at that point,"Nayar observed.
The dropped catches hurt the hosts and Mumbai paid the price for dropping Saha twice. "In the end you could say that the dropped chances of Saha let Bengal off the hook. But nobody does it on purpose," said Nayar, talking about Kshemal Waingankar dropping the Bengal keeper.
Nayar struck in each of this three spells to return figures of 19-12-13-6.
"I worked really hard this off season and sorted out my run-up, some variations and my action. I even spoke to Zaheer Khan."