Battle of wits in Duleep final

After two back-to-back victories, an inspired West Zone will rely on its experienced players to come up with a good show against East Zone, led by former India captain Saurav Ganguly, in the four-day Duleep Trophy final beginning on Saturday at Sardar Patel Stadium in Motera.

East has a young and talented side wherein the likes of Arindam Das, Shib Sundar Das, Deep Das Gupta have the ability to put up inspired performances.

"Besides, East is being led by Ganguly, who is an inspiring leader and can motivate youngsters to perform above their potential," West Zone coach Balwinder Singh Sandhu said.

"We have to dig deep into the experience of senior players like Ramesh Powar and captain Sairaj Bahutule, who can turn the bowl, and the pace department led by the in-form and experienced Zaheer Khan," Sandhu said, adding "we have a lot of experience on our side".

Zaheer is looking in good form and is bowling in good rhythm, he said.

In their last two matches, West have registered outright victories against South Zone in Vadodara and Central Zone in Aurangabad.

"Though we have not played East in the recent past, we have a good record against them and are confident of putting up an impressive performance", Sandhu added.

Meanwhile, both the teams have arrived here and will be going through a strenuous net session on Friday evening.

Teams (From):

West Zone: Sairaj Bahutule (capt), Dhiraj Jadav, Wasim Jaffer, Satyajit Parab, Niraj Patel, Jacob Martin, Partiv Patel (wk), Romesh Pawar, Akash Christian, Jaydev Shah, Siddarth Trivedi, Munaf Patel, Zaheer Khan, Rakesh Patel and Vinit Indulkar.

East Zone: Saurav Ganguly (capt), Shiv Sundar Das, Arindam Das, Rohan Gavaskar, Sourashish Lahiri, L R Shukla, Sanjiv Sanyal, S S Paul, Ranadeb Bose, S S Rao, S V Sarvanan, Niranjan Behera, S Nadim, Manoj Tewari, Sujit Roy and Deep Dasgupta.