The fourth season of Star Sports Pro Kabaddi is up and running and after the first leg of the fourth season, it is easy to decipher why the organisers decided to hold the glitzy tournament twice in a year. The decision seems to have received a unanimous thumbs up by viewers across the country as well as crowds that have poured in Mumbai to watch the matches.
The action on the mat has also lived up to the expectations of those in attendance as already the tournament has thrown up some exciting contests and some brilliant individual performances. The Kabaddi caravan will now travel northwards to the pink city of Jaipur, the home of Abhishek Bachchan-owned and season one winners Jaipur Pink Panthers.
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But before more exhilarating performances pile on the ones that we witnessed in Mumbai, here is a recap of the 5 memories that the first leg of Pro Kabaddi Season 4 will be remembered forever:
1. Pune wins its first Maharashtra derby
Before this match against U Mumba, not many would have given Puneri Paltan a chance to beat the most consistent team in Pro Kabaddi history. In the six Maharashtra derbies between these teams, never did Puneri Paltan manage to come out on top.
Besides, they were facing U Mumba at Dome@NSCI SVP Stadium, which can be easily labelled as the home team’s fortress as they have never lost a league game at home and out of the 17 times they have played in front of their home crowd, only once they’ve been upstaged.
If not anything, U Mumba’s stellar reputation is enough to push teams a little on the backfoot. But all talks of reputation and home advantage came to naught as the actual home team stumbled to its biggest defeat in the history of the tournament. It also ended up conceding the bragging rights of an unbeaten streak in the Maharashtra derby.
Ajay Thakur and Manjeet Chillar were virulent against a U Mumba defence that was caught napping to help Pune win by a massive margin of 41-19.
2. Women’s Kabaddi Challenge kicked off
A new chapter in the history of the game was written when on the last day of the first leg, Firebirds met Ice Divas in Mumbai to kick off the Women’s Kabaddi Challenge. The challenge will be played out alongside the league on the same mat that is used for the men’s games.
The three teams, the third one being Storm Queens, will face off each other twice in a round-robin format.
After the six matches are done and dusted, the teams placed in second and third position will compete in a qualifier to determine who plays in the final against the round robin winners. The finals are set to be hosted alongside the Men’s Pro Kabaddi Finals on 31st July at Hyderabad.
While a full-fledged league for the women is still in the pipeline, it is heartening to see the attempts by the organizers to make the league more and more inclusive.
3. Captain Manjeet Chillar claws back a tie
Puneri Paltan have had a see-saw season so far. They have seen the highs of winning against U Mumba as well as the low of being outsmarted against the Patna Pirates. Their match against Dabang Delhi, thus, was of immense importance to them as a loss would have seen them give up on the advantage they built by winning their first two encounters and a win would have seen them going into the second leg with 3 wins under their belt.
However, the team started on a stuttering note to see Delhi take a 5-0 lead early in the game. They made their way back into the match with a 4 point lead at the half time but with Delhi breathing down their neck, the lead wasn’t going to count much and Delhi collected some crucial points to take a lead ahead of the final whistle.
That’s when Captain Manjeet Chillar, as he has done so often, jumped to team’s rescue by scoring 2 points in the last minute to ensure their team doesn’t end up the home leg on a losing note.
4. Shabeer Bapu comes back to haunt U Mumba
The mass exodus in the auctions ahead of the 4th season of the league from U Mumba did make a lot of heads turn. And it was always going to be interesting to see the likes of Mohit Chillar, Fazel Atrachali and Shabeer Bapu, who had made U Mumba the feared team that it is today, take on their former team.
And the first match presented the first such showdown when Shabeer Bapu came up against U Mumba while wearing the colours of Jaipur Pink Panthers.
To say that Bapu troubled his ex-teammates would be an understatement as he collected 9 raid points and only if he had some support from his fellow Panthers, the match could have easily ended in the Panthers favour.
Although the match ended at a close 36-34, the defeat couldn’t take off the sheen from the superlative performance turned in by Bapu against his former employers.
5. Jang-Kun Lee’s mesmerizing cartwheel
Jang-Kun Lee is fast earning the reputation of the silent assassin of Star Sports Pro Kabaddi with his innocuous quiet looks and lethal stinging raids. The Korean put up a brilliant show against Bengaluru to collect 5 points but ended up on the losing side as Rohit Kumar helped the Bulls to edge past Bengal with a one-point win.
Lee’s brilliance came to the fore when at one point he was the only Bengal player left on the mat, but instead of conceding Bengaluru additional points for an all out, Lee claimed three points putting his team in the lead.
The Korean was back in action the next day against Dabang Delhi and after scoring a raid point, he gave a little exhibition of his skills when he chose to cartwheel to his half instead of walking back there. The raider is not only establishing himself firmly as one of the best in the league, but also making his fans fall in love more and more with every passing season.
