Cuttack: The prospect of Odisha making it to the semifinal appears remote as Bengal took the vital first innings lead on the third day of the five-day Ranji Trophy quarterfinal at DRIEMS Ground here on Saturday.
Resuming their overnight score at 151 for 4, Odisha were all out for 250 after losing the remaining six wickets, adding only 99 runs, giving a vital 82 first innings lead to Bengal.
Ishan Porel, Nilkantha Das and Mukesh Kumar bagged three wickets each while Shahbaz claimed one wicket for Bengal.
The visitors began on a confident note in their second innings with the two openers, Koushik Ghosh and Captain AR Easwaran taking the score to 60. However, both of them got out quickly after Govind Poddar and Anurag Sarangi claimed the wicket of Easwaran (30) and Koushik (41) respectively.
At close, Abhishek Kumar Raman and Manoj Tiwary were at 4 and 3 respectively with the score at 79.
With the visitors taking an overall lead of 161 runs, the Odisha bowlers have to work hard to restrict the score to stay in contention for a semi-final berth.
