The preliminary quarter-final match between Jharkhand and Nagaland was played in Kolkata at the Eden Gardens between the 12th and 16th of March. Jharkhand ended up totally clean sweeping the match and inflicting a crushing upon their rivals. Nagaland on the other hand was never actually able to get a firm footing in the match.
Having won the toss, Nagaland opted to field first but it ended up being a horrible decision on their part. The best performers of Jharkhand in the first innings were Kumar Kushagra (266 off 269) and Shahbaz Nadeem (177 off 304). Nagaland’s Imliwati Lemtur picked up some wickets and had a good spell of 4/179 (51.4) and Khrievitso Kense picked up 3 wickets for 166 runs but that was not enough to hold the Jharkhand batting order.
Jharkhand scored a massive first innings total of 880/10 (203.4 overs) and that pretty much said everything we needed to know about the match as Jharkhand was totally winning it from here.
Coming in to bat, Chetan Bist scored 122 off 253 but none of the other batters of Nagaland was able to perform well and they were all down for just 289 runs.
In their second innings again, Jharkhand again played tremendously and scored 417/6 in 90.3 overs. Anukul Roy scored 153 off 163 while Kumar Kushagra scored 89 off 104. With this, they won by first innings score by a massive margin of over 1008 runs.
Jharkhand defeat Nagaland by a huge margin of 1008 runs
