Patna Pirates began their home leg in fine fashion with a dominating 44-28 victory over Bengal Warriors in the 2023-24 Pro Kabaddi League in Patna on Friday. Manjeet (10 raid points). Nitin Kumar (10 raid points) and Mayur Kadam (6 tackle points) were the top performers of the game.
In the second match of the night, Gujarat Giants beat U Mumba 44-35 to climb to 4th place on the PKL table. An all-round performance was boosted by the brilliance of Parteek Dahiya who scored 12 points in the game. Guman Singh's 11 points went in vain for U Mumba whose lacklustre defence ultimately cost them the game.
The last time Patna and Bengal played, it was a raid fest but that wasn’t the case this time around. Both sides banked on their defenders and two brilliant tackles from Kadam – one on Maninder Singh and the other on Nitin – put the home team ahead. Patna's ace raider Sachin Tanwar wiped out the Bengal defence soon after to lead his men to an all-out and a 13-7 lead in the 13th minute.
The home team dominated the remaining 7 minutes to reduce their opponents to 3 men at the end of the 1st half. It took them only 4 minutes to inflict another all-out as Sachin, the newly-appointed Patna captain, got the better of the remaining 2 defenders.
Patna had seized complete control of the game and some incredible raiding from Manjeet and Sachin put Bengal in more trouble.
Kadam, playing his first game of the season, executed a rock-solid tackle on Aditya Shinde to lead Patna inflict a third all-out on Bengal. The three-time champions led by 22 points with the scoreline reading 34-12 in their favour.
Patna were in no mood to take their foot off the gas as multi-point raids from Sachin and Manjeet had Bengal down to just 1 man in the 35th minute. However, the all-out was stalled as Nitin produced a mindblowing 4-point raid to give his side something to cheer about. Bengal managed an all-out in the final minutes of play, but that did not change the fate of the game as Patna soared to a comprehensive 16-point win.
Giants beat U Mumba
After trading points in the opening few raids, the game truly sparked to life after Sonu Jaglan's super raid in the fifth minute that took out Heidarali Ekrami, Surinder Singh, Mukilan Shanmugam and Visvanth V to give Gujarat a stranglehold on the game. They were expected to quickly complete the job, but for the next 15 minutes of the half, U Mumba went into survival mode.
Bittu's super tackle on Sonu soon after started a revival that extended right till the final minute of the half. Gujarat finally got their all-out on the edge of half-time to take a 20-17 lead at the break.
Gujarat upped the ante in the second half, and bolstered by their raiders even the defence stepped up to start collecting points at regular intervals to increase the gap between the sides. U Mumba's brief revival was cut short by a second all-out which gave Gujarat a 33-27 lead.
They consolidated the lead in the final quarter of the game, as Dahiya completed his 10 point game. In the end, Gujarat denied U Mumba a chance of coming back, as they wrapped up a massive 9-point victory.
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