Bihar recovered after a poor start to make 258 on the openingday of their East Zone Ranji Trophy league match against Assamat the Keenan stadium in Jamshedpur on Wednesday

13-Jan-2000Bihar recovered after a poor start to make 258 on the openingday of their East Zone Ranji Trophy league match against Assamat the Keenan stadium in Jamshedpur on Wednesday. At stumpsAssam reply were five for no loss off three overs.Opting to bat, Bihar lost three wickets for 24. All the wicketswere taken by medium pacer J Zaman who dismissed D Chakravarthy,A Hashmi and Rajiv Kumar in successive overs. The recovery processwas initiated by opener N Ranjan (58) and skipper Sunil Kumar(68) who added 104 runs for the fourth wicket off 32.4 overs.While Ranjan faced 141 balls and hit seven fours, Sunil Kumarfaced 170 balls and also hit seven of them to the ropes.Sunil Kumar and Sandeep Roy (24) continued the recovery processby putting on 55 runs off 19.3 overs for the fifth wicket. Therest of the batsmen, with the exception of wicketkeeper MSDhoni, however came to grief against O Singh who took four ofthe last six wickets to fall and finished with five for 81 off28.3 overs. Dhoni scored a valuable 40 off 62 balls with thehelp of eight fours. Zaman finished with three for 45.