Winning their second game on the trot, the Gujarat Giants beat U.P. Yoddha 31-38 in their Pro Kabaddi League Season 8 fixture played on Sunday. Yoddha’s star raider Pardeep Narwal scored a Super 10 in the match but even that was not enough to penetrate Gujarat’s impeccable defense. The win propelled the Giants to the fourth spot in the points table and kept their playoff hopes alive.
The game started with a running hand touch from Pardeep Narwal and Gujarat evened it out with a bonus point. The game’s first defining moment came when Hadi Oshtorak’s diving ankle hold proved too much for Narwal. Oshtorak followed this up with a diving thigh hold on Gill and both of the U.P’s star raiders were out with the Giants having a three-point lead.
This spurred on a sleeping U.P. defense and they replied with a super tackle of their own. Shubham Kumar with a brilliant chain block and U.P closed in on the three-point lead. The danger of a big lead wasn’t averted completely though as U.P was reduced to three men and an all-out loomed shortly.
Yoddhas’s substitute raider, Shrikant Jadhav, took the mat in a do-or-die raid but he couldn’t do much as Gujarat’s defense was firing on all cylinders. U.P was down 4-7 and it seemed as though Sumit and Nitesh had pulled off a super tackle. The review however showed that Pardeep had made it to the midline just on sheer force and the scorecard suddenly read 4-11.
For a brief period in the match, Narwal looked out of sorts as the Giants defense had an upper hand on him. A slight lapse of concentration and he was nabbed from behind. His own team’s defense however failed to latch on to HS Rakesh’s ankle and Gujarat’s 8 lead now soared to 10. A few moments later, Girish Ernak spurts a massive block and took down Narwal again, a second all-out within the first 14 minutes followed moments later.
The Gujarat defense inflict a tackle upon Surender Gill
The end of the first half was close by and U.P. had reduced the 14 points lead to 10 after a chain defense by U.P stopped Rakesh’s dubki. But even with just three men on the mat Giants brought down Surinder Gill and entered the first half with a 12 point lead.
U.P’s counterpunch after the break was led by their defense when they brought down Mahendra Rajput and Rakesh in two successful defensive tackles and the Giants were down to two men again. But the U.P, team needed their star raider to fire and Narwal compensated for the first half’s failure with a six-point raid. Narwal reached 1300 career points with this raid and his team was trying to make a comeback from behind on the back of this raid as the score read 22-28.
Despite this super raid, the Giants maintained a steady six or seven lead for the remainder of the second half but U.P. was slowly biding its time. The instruction from the Giants corner was to slow the game down but even they knew that they still had to resist one final attack from the Yoddhas.
A final strategic time out was completed and we were in for a scintillating final three minutes, with the score being 27-34 in favor of Gujarat. U.P first took down Rakesh and then Pardeep to add two more points, reducing Gujarat to two men with the lead just three points at 31-34.
U.P now needed to take down Ajay in his raid and force and all-out to level the scores. Ajay Kumar set out for a raid and tried to collect a point via a hand touch. U.P stayed disciplined throughout but they were on the backfoot and Ajay took advantage scoring a bonus point.
The replays showed that U.P’s Nitesh had stepped into the lobby without touch and was deemed out. Before the final moments of the match, Gujarat inflicted their final super tackle on Narwal and took the game home.