A final raid in the dying seconds of the game saw Ajay Thakur prove his class and turn the tables on Bengal Warriors in the ProKabaddi League at the Thyagaraj sports complex here on Sunday. Tamil Thalaivas edged past Warriors 33-32.
The result ended Bengal’s four-match unbeaten streak and halted its march towards the top of the table in Zone B. Thalaivas, however, remained at the bottom although it has played six games fewer than Bengal.
Trailing by three points with two minutes to go, Thakur took it upon himself to get the final few points, scoring four points in three successive raids to snatch away full points.
The Bengal raiding unit of Maninder Singh, Deepak Narwal and Jang Kun Lee tried its best, Maninder scoring 13 points, but it was not enough to stop a fighting Thalaivas from snatching its third win of the season even as the defence appeared off colour. In fact, every time Maninder went off the mat, Bengal struggled to score points while the opposition took full advantage of the situation.
For a large part, it was the defence that kept Thalaivas in the game. Arun and Darshan avoided an all-out repeatedly — the team managed three super tackles — and the raiding unit combined to do the rest, ensuring a Bengal all-out in the 12th minute.
But while the rest of the raiders failed to break the deadlock — the duo managed several super tackles to keep Thalaivas ahead for a large part of the game. Maninder managed to find gaps and kept chipping away points. Bengal first went ahead in the 31st minute after Thalaivas was finally all-out and Maninder pulled ahead to make it 32-29 with two minutes to go.
But that was before Thakur came into the act to upset Bengal’s calculations.
In another match, Dabang Delhi stumble to its third straight loss at home, losing 42-24 to a dominating Haryana Steelers.
The results: Tamil Thalaivas 33 (Ajay Thakur 8, C. Arun 8, M. Thivakaran 5) bt Bengal Warriors 32 (Maninder Singh 13, Surjeet Singh 5, Deepak Narwal 4, Jang Kun Lee 4); Haryana Steelers 42 (Rakesh Kumar Singh 7, Deepak Kumar Dahiya 6, Surender Nada 5, Prashanth Kumar Rai 5, Neeraj Kumar 4) bt Dabang Delhi 24 (Satpal 6, Rohit Baliyan 5, Meraj Sheykh 4).