There are days when the plans go awry and well worked out methods do not quite work cohesively. Our Dabangs had one of those last night here at Patna’s Pataliputra Sports Complex.  

Despite valiant efforts from our players, the hosts registered their first win of the home leg and second of the tournament. While we started with Ravinder again being retained as captain, the Pirates had a change of guard upfront as Sandeep Narwal took over from the experienced Rakesh Kumar.

The match itself got off to a slow start as both teams exchanged a couple of empty raids. Deepak Narwal and Ravi Dalal got the first two points for the home side, but Rohit Kumar Chaudhary returned with a super raid as we took the lead 3-2 after the 3rd minute. The Pirates broke free after the 7th minute when the score was tied at 4-4. Sandeep, Deepak Narwal, Ravi Dalal then combined really well to inflict an all-out on us in the 11th minute. The scoreline then read 12-6. Minutes later, we had an encore of the aforementioned and the scoreboard read 21-7 with 5 minutes left in the half.

We stayed persistent though and went all out with our raids. Rohit and Kashi both seemed to have regained their touch in the 2^nd half as with their nimble and swift footwork, they tried getting us closer. Coach Honnappa too seemed to re-strategize during the break, bringing in a multitude of substitutions in what seemed to be an attempt to restructure our defense and shielding our raiders.

It thus didn’t come as a surprise that we improved by leaps and bounds. We finally got our first tackle point in the 24th minute when they trapped Ravi Dalal.

The disappointment aside though, there are a lot of positives that the team can take from last night’s game, from Rohit’s surging raids to Ravinder maintaining his aura in defense, we have reason to be optimistic ahead of tonight’s game vs the indomitable U Mumba. With 6 wins out of as many games, they sure have been the team to beat this season. Coach Honnappa refused to get bogged down by that bit of trivia though, “Yes, they have been playing well, but we are in really good shape too. If we can put up a good show, there is no reason why we can’t beat them. We got the better of them last season too (36-27 in Pune) and I don’t see why we can’t repeat that tonight.”

Commenting upon the team’s performance against the Pirates, he added, “It was a bad day for us, not much seemed to work. We will however come out strong tonight and hopefully list another win.”

The ‘Dabang’ spirit makes our coach and his pupils buoyant, reason enough for us to believe that last night would prove to be just an aberration in what will be a spectacular season of Pro Kabaddi League for us.