In a nail-biting tussle between the hosts Dabang Delhi and U Mumba, the home side's habit of faltering at the end came back to haunt them and cost them a crucial match here on Friday.
A fierce contest was witnessed between the two teams at the Thyagaraj stadium here in the first game of the Delhi leg of PKl 5 where both teams remained neck-and-neck for a large part of the game before Mumbai pulled away in the last minute to secure the win.
What was noticeable about the game was the minor role played by the two captains in the game. Both Meraj Sheykh and Anup Kumar couldn't show their raiding prowess and got tackled successfully on more than one occasion. Jadhav was the leading scorer in the match with 11 points.
The match started promisingly for the home side with them taking a 12-3 lead in just the 10th minute of the first half by inflicting an all-out on their opponents. Delhi managed three successful tackles early on in the game to take the lead and put Mumbai in a precarious position.
The advantage was sealed by Meraj when he inflicted a super raid in the 10th minute to complete the all-out.
It seemed one-way traffic at that point but Mumbai fought back strongly. Anup got a rare successful raid on Friday in the 12th minute but the star for the Mumbai side was Kashiling Adake who raided successfully several times to revive Mumbai and got them the all-out in the 17th minute, allowing his team to draw level in the next minute.
The first half ended with both teams locked at 16-16.
The match became extremely tight from there on as both sides didn't allow the difference to grow bigger than one point throughout most of the match.
Meraj, after his super raid in the first half, lost his rhythm completely and got tackled multiple times. His opposite number Anup decided to stay in his own half most of the time and marshal his troops from there.
With both captains taking a backseat, the onus of scoring fell on Rohit Balyan, Abolfazl Maghsodlu and Anand Patil for the hosts while Shrikant Jadhav and Kashiling Adake were leading the charge for the visitors.
Maghsodlu lost his good form of the first half and his raids were going empty while Patil showed some promise with two successful raids.
Jadhav was looking most impressive for Mumbai but neither team could pull away and only one point separated the two teams going into the last two minutes.
Anup decided to lead from the front and came into raid but was undone by Meraj through an ankle hold. Delhi now led 28-26 and looked favourites.
But when Maghsodlu got tackled successfully, their lead was down to one point going into the final minute. And that got wiped out when the star of the day, Jadhav pulled off a two-point raid to put his team in the lead and the game was sealed when Patil fell to a successful raid.