Manoj Tiwary, Minister of Sports and Youth Welfare of the West Bengal government, will be playing Ranji Trophy for his state this year. His name has been included in the 21-member team announced by Cricket Association of Bengal headed by Sourav Ganguly. The Thirty-six-year-old sports minister will be playing for session 2021-22.
West Bengal will play its first match against Tripura on 13 January at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. Manoj Tiwary had last played for Bengal in their Ranji final against Saurashtra in March 2020.
Tiwary will be playing under the present captain of the Bengal squad, Abhimanyu Easwaran. West Bengal is placed in Group B along with Kerala, Haryana, Rajasthan, Tripura, and Vidarbha.
Manoj has played 12 ODIs and 3 T20I matches for the Indian national team. He has a total score of 8965 runs at an average of 50.36 and played 125 matches in first-class cricket. After his last match with Saurashtra, he took up politics as his career and is now serving as the sports minister in Mamata Banerjee government.
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West Bengal's Ranji Trophy squad includes names of Abhimanyu Ishwaran (capt), Manoj Tiwary, Sudeep Chatterjee, Anustup Majumdar, Abhishek Raman, Sudeep Garami, Abhishek Das, Vrittik Chatterjee, Ritwik Roy Chowdhury, Abhishek Poral, Shahbaz Ahmed, Zion Shekhar Mondal, Kazi Junaid Saifi, Zakir Habib, Gandhi, Pradipta Pramanik, Geet Puri, Nilakanta Das and Karan Lal.
