Pro Kabaddi League 2017 Season 5: Five talking points from Day 40 of PKL 5

With another Tuesday came another day packed with exciting Kabaddi action at the Motilal Nehru School of Sports which hosted a doubleheader on the night. The Bengal Warriors took on the Telugu Titans in the first of the contests while neighbours Haryana and Delhi clashed in the second match of the night.

The first contest provided an absolute thriller for the viewers where the Warriors enhanced their reputation as the team with the killer instinct when they came back from a 10 point deficit in the last five minutes to eke out a single point win with the last raid of the game.

The contest between Delhi and Haryana looked one sided for the most part of the game, especially in the first half, before a spirited Delhi showed some spunk in the second half before going down bravely against the home team in the final few minutes.

Here are the five talking points from the 40th day

#1 Bengal's super defence produces double super tackles

Captain Surjeet Singh collected another High 5 for Bengal in defence

In the first few legs of Season 5, Bengal was one of the teams that suffered from poor defending. And that was one of the primary reasons the team lagged behind in the points table. But gradually Rann Singh and Surjeet Singh have got their form back and the result of it for the team is there for all to see.

Thanks to that, what once looked the team’s weak link has turned into its strongest suit. In the first half of the match, they gave another good demonstration of how strong the defence has grown over the season.

Bengal were reduced to three men twice and first, it was Iranian Mohsen Moghsoudlou and then Rahul Chaudhari who thought the time was ripe to reduce the Warriors to two men on the court and bring them to the brink of an All Out. And both were left red faced as the three men defence of Bengal proved two good and brought their team two super tackles by bringing down both Moghsoudlou and Chaudhari with ease.

Maghsoudlou shot himself in the foot by venturing too deep into the Bengal defence while Chaudhari was blocked by the boulder of a man that Surjeet Singh is.

The good work by the defence, however, was almost undone by Srikant Tewatia who kept committing errors that reflected poorly on the team’s defence which brought them into a position where they almost went on to concede a defeat.

#2 Maninder levels the score

After a sluggish first half, Maninder got going in the second half with a toe touch on Chaudhari

Maninder Singh doesn’t look like a man who keeps grudges. He is a man who hardly celebrates his raid points and has not even been seen celebrating his team’s wins most of the times. But when the second half began, Singh seemed to be on some mission.

He didn’t have the best of first halves where he spent almost half of the 20 minutes on the bench. In fact, he was also at the receiving end of an ankle hold by Rahul Chaudhari who got his team a crucial tackle point despite contributing little with his raiding.

And that’s why Maninder came on to take the first raid of the second half with much fervour as he took Rahul Chaudhari out of the equation with a nifty toe touch. The latter's night went from bad to worse in the subsequent 20 minutes while Maninder's night only improved as he ended the night with crucial seven points that helped his team snatch a win from the jaws of defeat.

#3 Warriors provide a comeback for ages!

The last raid of the match proved to be the decisive one and Jang Kun Lee got his team the winning point

In the 24th minute of the game, Nilesh Salunke’s four point raid seemed to have sealed the fate of the game for Telugu Titans as it left Bengal Warriors with just one man on the court. An All Out seemed a formality from there on and was duly inflicted with the teams going into a timeout with a ten point difference that screamed a Titans win.

But the Warriors have transformed as a team this season, and from being a team that lacked a killer instinct in the previous seasons, Surjeet Singh’s men now wear the never say die attitude on their sleeve. And they, for the umpteenth time this season, made a comeback their co-owner 'Khiladi' Akshay Kumar would be proud of, for it was nothing short of heroic.

Helped by some lightning fast bonus efforts by Jang Kun Lee, they brought home five points in the next one and a half minutes to reduce the deficit to five. The match was still Titans’ to lose when the last three minutes began as they still had a healthy lead in the bag.

But the team just capitulated in front of a razor sharp attack from Maninder Singh and Jang Kun Lee. The latter put in the last raid of the match when the scores were level and returned a hero by overcoming a charging Rohit Rana and winning the contest for his team!

#4 Wazir's five point Super Raid

In the end, Wazir's five point raid proved to be the difference between the two teams

Already looking like a mismatch from the moment it started, Wazir Singh just killed the Haryana Delhi contest in the 10th minute of the game itself. Having seen his team lose the plot to allow a weak Delhi to come in within touching distance of Haryana’s score, Singh brought his team back and put them on top with a fantastic super raid in the 10th minute.

Seeing Singh struggle on the retreat to make it to the mid line, all of Delhi’s players came to the support to bring their team one tackle point. However, no one took care of Singh’s dangling hand which just about managed to cross the mid line and brought Singh and his team five vital points.

Singh celebrated his ‘fifer’ in style and so did all of Haryana for in the tenth minute itself the Steelers had pushed the game out of Delhi’s reach who were sans their captain and best raider Meraj Sheykh.

#5 Maghsodlou brings Delhi back into the match

In the absence of their talismanic captain, Abolfazl took on the mantle of the team's leading raider

The Dabang unit had nothing going for them in the first half and went to the dug out nine points behind. However, some complacency from the Steelers and some pro activeness from the Delhi side saw Delhi come back into the contest in the second half. And the man leading that comeback was Iranian Maghsodlou.

The tall raider was up against two of the best defenders of the opposition who sensed a super tackle opportunity.

With Maghsodlou going in deep to get a hand touch on Surender Nada, Mohit Chhillar threw himself at the retreating Iranian who just managed to cross the mid line with his body almost in the air. However, a little part of his body was still in the lobby and that ensured that Delhi got four points out of the raid and came back in the match.

The next few minutes saw a nervous Haryana commit some silly mistakes to concede points to Delhi and help them reduce the deficit even more.

Although the team failed to end up on the winning side, it did show some steely resolve in not giving up despite the absence of some of the big names in the team.