The Tamil Nadu Ranji team will enter familiar territory at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium when it takes on Madhya Pradesh in its third match of the season starting on Sunday.
Last week, Tamil Nadu scored an emphatic 277-run win over Jammu and Kashmir at Dindigul. After losing to Karnataka in the opening game from a position of comfort, the outright win gave the team a much-needed confidence boost.
TN captain R. Prasanna said: “We went into the game looking for seven points. After we scored 254, our target was to get them out below 105 and force the follow-on. We planned for all the four sessions.”
Bharath Shankar inThe re-laid wicket at Chepauk will be used for the first time and is likely to assist the spinners.
Tamil Nadu has made one change to the squad with K. Bharath Shankar coming in for the injured Vijay Shankar.
Coach W.V. Raman said: “We will forget what happened in the last match.
“It is easy to be deflated once you lose a game in which you were in control for two days (referring to the Karnataka match).”
With six points from two matches, Tamil Nadu is third in Group A and will hope to score another outright win in home conditions.
For Madhya Pradesh, this will be a crucial tie after it lost the last game against Uttar Pradesh, despite having taken a 116-run lead before being bowled out for 63 in the second innings.
With just one point from two matches, in a group featuring heavyweights like Mumbai, Bengal and Karnataka, it is important for MP not to slip further behind.
Its batting order is likely to get a boost with the arrival of Naman Ojha, who was in Australia as part of the Indian squad for the first Test at Adelaide.
MP will be without pacer Ishwar Pandey, who suffered a hamstring injury in the last game, but skipper Devendra Bundela feels the impact of his absence will be minimal with the spinners likely to be more effective.
The squads (from):
Tamil Nadu: R. Prasanna (captain), Abhinav Mukund, M. Kaushik Gandhi, B. Aparajith, Dinesh Karthik, B. Indrajith, Malolan Rangarajan, L. Balaji, M. Mohammed, J. Kaushik, R. Aushik Srinivas, K. Bharath Shankar, U. Sushil, T. Natarajan, Rahil S. Shah.
Madhya Pradesh: Devendra Bundela (captain), Mohnish Mishra, Jalaj Saxena, Naman Ojha, Sanjay Mishra, Harpreet Singh Bhatia, Rameez Khan, Puneet Datey, Ankit Sharma, Yogesh Rawat, Avesh Khan, Anand Singh Bais, Aditya Srivastava, Ankit Dane, Shubham Sharma, Saransh Jain.
