Rajat Patidar leads Central Zone to Duleep Trophy title

Rajat Patidar continues to embellish his trophy cabinet as the IPL 2025 winning-captain led Central Zone to victory in the Duleep Trophy final against South Zone in Bengaluru on Monday, September 15. Central Zone, who batted South Zone out of the game in the first innings, went into Day 5 requiring just 65 runs to win. They reached the finish line in the 21st over, even as they lost four wickets in the process.

Ankit Sharma and Andre Siddarth’s 192-run partnership on Day 4 saved South Zone from the ignominy of losing by an innings, but their defiance couldn’t bail their team entirely out of choppy waters as defeat seemed imminent. Central Zone’s Left-arm spinner Kumar Kartikeya, who got the ball to turn viciously in both innings, finished with eight wickets in the game – a four-wicket haul in each essay. Once Kartikeya broke the crucial partnership between the two set batters, South Zone’s innings unravelled quickly. They went from 414/6 to 426 all-out, setting Central Zone a very manageable target.

Ankit and Gurjapneet Singh offered South Zone a sliver of hope in the first hour as they reduced Central Zone to 24/3 in the lowly chase but the target was too puny to eke out a threatening, full-blown collapse. Ankit claimed a second wicket when he dismissed Patidar, but that was trivial in context of the impending result. In a fitting finish, Yash Rathod – Central Zone’s star performer from the first innings, sealed the conquest with a boundary off medium-pacer Vasuki Koushik.

Brief scores: South Zone 149 & 426 (Ankit Sharma 99, Andre Siddarth C 84*, Smaran Ravichandran 67; Kumar Kartikeya 4-110, Saransh Jain 3-130) lost to Central Zone 511 & 66/4 (Akshay Wadkar 19*, Yash Rathod 13*; Gurjapneet Singh 2-21) by 6 wickets