34th National Games, Jharkhand: Punjab trounce Maharashtra – Men’s Hockey Update
The Punjab Men’s hockey defeated Maharashtra in a close fight of 3-2 score at the 34th National Games being held in Jharkhand, India.
Punjab outplayed in the first half closing minute converting a head-to-head position to a one goal lead. In the second half the similar scenario was derived into a win at the 66th minute of the match to take the victory.
However, the match’s introductory goal was done by the Maharashtra’s Diwakar Ram as a result of the penalty corner awarded to the team in the 14th minute. This lead was soon matched up by the Punjab team on scoring their first goal in the 19th
minute, which was shot by the striker, Gurvinder Singh and the match was level at 1-all.
Later, the match became belligerent with both teams on the front foot to attack each other’s goal. Consequently, Garpreet Singh from Punjab availed a gap during the penalty corner to break the score into a lead of one goal in the last minute of the first
half. The score was 2-1 at the half.
The second half started off well in the beginning for the Maharashtra’s strikers with ball in hand and chances to overpower Punjab. They handled the ball magnificently as they managed to score a goal in the 43rd minute of the match, attempted
by Maharashtra’s striker, Lalit Upadhyay to tie-up the score again to a 2-all score.
The match was twisting and turning on both sides uniformly and it was hard to critique which team would slot the tie-breaking goal. Finally in the conclusive minutes of the match Punjab’s Gurvinder Singh shot a goal to take Punjab’s lead to 3-2 over Maharashtra.
Punjab’s defence handled the last four minutes of the match as they kept Maharashtra from scoring any further goals. As the final whistle blew, it was Punjab that walked off the field with a brilliant 3-2 win. The team put in a decent effort on both offence
and defence to dominate Maharashtra. It will be interesting to see how far Punjab’s Men’s hockey team will go in the tournament.
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