Ranji Trophy | U19 talents are only way out for Mumbai cricket, attests Aditya Tare

The Ranji Trophy nightmare for record champions continues as they fail to go past the league stage for the second time in a row. After a disastrous start at home against Railway and Karnataka, a tie against Saurashtra has ended their knockout hopes. Mumbai skipper Aditya Tare couldn’t help but admit that their poor performance across departments resulted in the disaster. Tare pointed out that pushing for a victory every match backfired for them worsening the situation.

“We won our first game at Baroda and that was an exciting start. We wanted to have a result-oriented pitch against Railways. We had an experienced batting line-up for that game and we obviously wanted to force a result. It backfired. Unfortunately, we lost the game and then against Karnataka as well,” Tare told Sportstar. “When you lose two back-to-back games outright, that just puts you back in the points table. Had we won either one of those games, maybe we would have been still in the hunt and would have been a different story.

“But obviously, we played poor cricket in those two games as a team. We batted poorly and we bowled poorly; it was an entire failure of the squad that sort of cost us those two games and the season.”

The keeper batsman believes that going back to their talented bench which is currently overflowing with inform U19 stars like Yashasvi Jaiswal and Divyaansh Saxena is the only way to revive Mumbai cricket.

“The learnings would be to just have a good core going into the next season; try and back players who are experienced in First-Class cricket; and pick young talent from the Under-19s, like we have Yashasvi , Ankolekar and Divyansh  who are having a good World Cup. There are a few other U-19 cricketers like Varun Lavande and others who we have to look closely at, monitor their progress and if we can pick them immediately into the seniors, that’ll be great,” Tare signed off.