Vijay Hazare Trophy | Mumbai get Prithvi Shaw and Ajinkya Rahane boost making them favourites in semis

After the completion of the Test series against Windies which India totally dominated, the already strong Mumbai team has been strengthened by the inclusion of young opener Prithvi Shaw and India’s longer format vice-captain Ajinkya Rahane. Rohit Sharma had already joined the team earlier and even played the quarterfinals in which he scored an unbeaten 33 runs while chasing a puny total of 70 runs against Bihar.

These developments make the Maharashtra based team the favourites against Hyderabad in the upcoming semifinal match of the Vijay Hazare Trophy. Though Hyderabad have some firepower in the form of Ambati Rayudu and pacer Mohammed Siraj, it is to be seen as to what amount of challenge that can pose to mighty Mumbai team which looks the strongest of all the teams in the ODI tournament, at least on paper, with Rohit Sharma, Shaw, and Rahane available for selection.

Performance wise the three top batsmen for Mumbai in the tournament so far have been Shreyas Iyer(311 runs), Prithvi (287) and Yadav (237 runs). Rahane has also been good with 230 runs. On the bowling front, Dhawal Kulkarni and spinner Shams Mulani have scalped 29 wickets together while Tushar Deshpande wrecked havoc in the semifinals against Bihar.

For Hyderabad BP Sandeep (342 runs) and Tanmay Agarwal (292 runs) have done the bulk of the scoring. The bowling department will have Siraj (8 wickets from 6 games) and Mehidy Hasan (13 wickets from 8 games).