Bengaluru, 11 Oct: Monu Goyat’s superb all-round performance gave Telugu Titans their first win of the season with a 30-21 win against Patna Pirates in the second game of the day at the Shree Kanteerava Indoor Stadium in Bengaluru.
The win lifted coach Manjeet Chillar’s side off the foot of the table and instead consigned the Pirates, last year’s runners up to a second straight loss.
The pregame talk was centered around the watertight defenses of both teams, and with Mohammadreza Shandlu on the Patna Pirates team sheet for the first time this season, the hype was all the more real. Shadloui was the defender of the season last time around.
And yet, for all the talk, the opening quarter of the match was dominated by the attacking verve shown by both sides, Monu Goyat and Sachin, trading blows throughout to keep the scoreboard ticking. The two teams traded 13 points before the Pirates registered the first tackle points of the game.
From thereon though, the Titans, and Goyat, took over. The experienced raider kept nibbling away at the Pirates defence, snapping bonus points at will. A close game was suddenly blown open by a Super Tackle by the Titans to take a 10-9 lead. Their narrow lead was consolidated further in Goyat’s very next raid, his two-point raid, registering the first and only All Out of the match. Telugu Titans went into halftime leading 21-13.
Chillar’s message to his team in the second half was focused on ensuring they kept their momentum going, and the players responded perfectly, never allowing Pirates a toe back into the encounter.
Shadloui’s appearance, while not entirely unsuccessful (he registered 2 tackle points from four tackles) was less impactful as his team would have hoped for. At the other end, a lack of bite from their raiders, did not help their cause either.
With a quarter of the game to go, the Titans had notched up a comfortable eight-point lead, and from there on, for the Pirates, it became a matter of trying to get at least a point of the encounter by reducing that deficit. Despite their toil, Chillar’s boys, stung perhaps by their two earlier losses, were keen to maintain and even extend the gap.
In the end, Goyat, the definite player of the match, completed his own 10 points for the game, albeit registering the double digits with a tackle, rather than a raid.
It summed up the evening for the Pirates, who will now look ahead, and hope to slowly start climbing the table. The Titans meanwhile have their first points on the board.
Award Winners of the Night:
Patna Pirates vs Telugu Titans
