Faiz Fazal's fighting qualities come to the fore

Faiz Fazal's century in the second innings ensured that Rest of India were on track to chase down an imposing target © Getty

He doesn't look flashy while at the crease, preferring elegance to raw aggression. He rarely gets perturbed, maintaining a cool head in the face of some hostile bowling at the top of the order, and these are the qualities that have made Faiz Fazal, the most consistent and dependable batsman of his state side, Vidarbha, in the recent past.

The left-hander, who was at his gritty best in the Ranji Trophy, scoring 559 runs in eight matches, played an important role in Vidarbha reaching the quarterfinals of the prestigious domestic tournament. What's more, all those runs came on tracks that helped the seamers, and he was suitably rewarded with a place in the Rest of India squad for the Irani Cup match against Mumbai.

And Fazal, 30, played a memorable knock on Thursday that helped Rest of India shock the hosts at the Brabourne Stadium after the latter had looked to be in total command at the end of the fourth day's play. He struck 127 (280 balls, 420 minutes, 10x4), as his side surpassed a mammoth 480-run target, and needless to say, Fazal was thrilled with the effort.

"We had this plan to just be there and keep wickets in hand. Luckily, it worked. When I was batting with Sudip [Chatterjee] and with Karun [Nair], our plan was to just get 3-4 runs in an over through singles and keep an eye out for the loose ball," said Fazal, post Rest of India's sensational victory.

"And if we had wickets in hand, we were really sure that we would get to the total. We had some attacking batsmen in Stuart [Binny] and Sheldon [Jackson] and they did very well to finish the job," he explained about his team's strategy.

He put on 130 runs with Nair and one thing that stood out about their performance was the tuning that the duo seemed to have developed. "We were communicating really well. Whenever, we tended to get nervous, we spoke to each other and got our confidence back," he said.

Meanwhile, Mumbai coach, Chandrakant Pandit, rued that fact that his team slipped from such a convincing position. "Whatever plans we had didn't work. Everything went against us. Of course, we should give credit to the batsmen for the way they batted, but I think we should have exploited the wicket much, much better than what we did," Pandit lamented.

By Dhananjay Roy.