U MUMBA continued their winning ways against Jaipur Pink Panthers to claim their second home victory at the DOME@NSCI SVP Stadium in Mumbai on Thursday. They were under constant pressure but they brought all their experience into play and held their nerve to win 36-32 in a closely-fought game.
It was a battle between U Mumba’s Kashiling Adake and Jaipur’s Pawan Kumar early in the first half as both the raiders kept scoring consistently. Neither side was able to pick up a tackle point for the first 15 minutes, and thus the responsibility of scoring fell squarely on the raiders. With the Pink Panthers leading 9-8, Jasvir Singh went in to raid and caused two defensive errors on the part of U Mumba to bring them down to one man. The U MumbaÂ
All-Out soon came thanks to the first tackle point of the evening in the 16th minute as Jaipur took a 14-9 lead. However, U Mumba kept the pressure on and came back strongly to just trail by one point as the half-time score read 16-15 in favour of the Pink Panthers.
Pawan raced to his Super 10 in the second half but the U Mumba raiders kept their head about to slither past Jaipur and get an early 19-18 lead. They increased their lead to 5 points by inflicting an All-Out on Jaipur in the 8th minute courtesy of some solid raiding by Captain Cool Anup Kumar.
Jasvir, however, put up a brave fight to pick up another U Mumba All-Out and reduce the deficit to just two points in the 19th minute with the scoreline favouring the home side 32-30. Under pressure, the U Mumba side gave Jaipur the opportunity to level the scores at 32-32 with just a minute left but star raider Adake had other plans. He came up with a game-changing 2-point raid with just seconds on the clock to tilt the match in Mumbai’s favour and the U Mumba defence before long lapped up Jasvir in his final raid to seal victory with a 36-32 scoreline.
U Mumba now sit second on the Zone A leaderboard as they head into their inter-zone challenge week match against Bengal Warriors on September 6, while Jaipur Pink Panthers will take on the confident Gujarat Fortunegiants on Sunday.