MARGAO
Goa Women enter their semi-finals clash against Karnataka at JU Second Campus, Salt Lake, Kolkata on Sunday in the Senior Women's ODI League Plate Group with odds stacked against them. Their rivals Karnataka, on virtue of being the Plate Group A winner, received a bye and now face an unfancied Goa team looking to rise to the challenge and upset the apple-cart.
In the earlier stage of competition, where they finished second in Plate Group C, Goa women pipped Tripura on Net Run Rate in their last game to chalk out a quarter-finals date with Kerala on December 22.
While their first knock-out game against Kerala was a stroll in the park, Karnataka will pose a much stiffer opposition. For a start, Goa Women have to provide more solidity in their scorecard where anything less than 160 on board will not augur well if they are to compete, given that they set a target.
A look at the performance of Karnataka Women in their Plate Group A reveals that they have surpassed a target of 145 set by Tamil Nadu in their first game, racked up 140 batting first against Odisha, lost a nail-biter to Saurashtra after stacking up 155/3 batting first and more recently against Punjab successfully chased down 181, with four wickets in hand and seven balls to spare.
Goa Women have shows signs of caving in even in chasing low targets in their Plate Group C. One need not go further than their Game V against Tripura where they eked out a one-wicket win with a low target of 64. Their best performance was a comprehensive eight-wicket win against Team Rajasthan going past their 139-run score in 37.5 overs. Even in their quarter-finals encounter against Kerala, batting first they managed to secure only 122 before skittling out the rivals for just 51 for a handsome
71-run win.
For Goa women, to make a match out of it, they need the welcome return to scoring ways of Shikha Pandey and Sanjula Naik, to continue against Karnataka. At the top of their order, they require Vinavi Gurav and Nikita Malik to click in unison and Sunanda Yetrekar to have a fine all-round performance pretty much the way she did in the Plate Group C match against Team Rajasthan.
The young batswomen like Sugandha Ghadi promoted to one-down in the last game should make the most of her next opportunity, while others like Vanita Bhandari and Sindiya Naik should also chip in with useful scores. Bolstered with the return of opening seamer Santoshi Rane to Goa Women duties, Shikha has now a formidable ally to hunt as a pair upfront in the bowling attack with a probing line, length and pace.
Karnataka have a strong batting unit with stumper-opener and India discard V Karuna Jain, one-down G Divya and C Prathyusha being among the runs. The Goa Women opening bowlers should look for an encore from their Kerala show to negate their impact on the game. Meanwhile, C Prathyusha has also been among the wickets and Goa batswomen would need to be at the top of their game to ward off the threat.
