Shrikant Jadhav impressed with his terrific performance and our defenders, too, gave their best but victory eluded the Yoddha camp yet again as the Bengaluru Bulls defeated us on Monday at the Shree Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex, Pune. Facing the Bulls for the third time, we gave them neck-and-neck fight but they proved to be the better side, winning with a 10-point margin.

Bhanu’s raid started off the proceedings, but the Bulls were off with a lead. Our first points were technical points, as the Bulls captain ran out of time during his raid. Narender came with a deadly dash to give us our second point. However, once our captain for the day, Nitesh, was out, the defense started getting weaker. While their raiders kept on gathering touch points, we resorted to bonus points. We were all out soon but got ourselves back on the mat in search of points.

Our defense was at their usual best, with Sagar Krishna taking charge. Narender and Nitesh put their A Game forward and kept the scores rolling. With some more defensive masterpieces, we kept on earning points to reach a 18-12 scoreline for the Bulls, at half-time.

Back in the second half, we opted for a cautious gameplan, pushing our opponents to do-or-die raids and building pressure on them. We reduced the Bulls to a team of three on the mat, but their brilliant Super-Tackle to Shrikant changed the course of the game again. Their raiders pulled off consecutive successful raids to earn points and eventually, we were All-Out yet again.

Shrikant, in the absence of Rishank and Prashanth, led the raiding contingent commendably, scoring his Super 10 and being the most efficient raider. However, his lone efforts failed to match up to Bulls’ trident raid-attack.

Our defenders shone again, tackling the Bulls with ease towards the end of the match and decreasing their lead. However, we could not get to winning terms, trailing behind by 10 points as the Bulls registered 37 points against our 27 points at the end of the match.

Shrikant was the most successful raider of the match with 12 points. He was given the VIVO Y Series Perfect Raider of the Match, while Nitesh was our most successful defender with 4 points from the match.