U Mumba beat Jaipur Pink Panthers to end home leg on high

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 Mumba All-Out soon came thanks to the first tackle point of the evening in the 16^th 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 8^th 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 19^th 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.

Check out our snapshots from this match here.