PKL 2019 | We lost the contest today because of our raiders, admits Pawan Sehrawat

Bengaluru Bulls were outplayed by Puneri Paltan in a one-sided encounter last night. Even though the scores were level at the end of the first half, Bengaluru Bulls’ raiders seemed to play half-heartedly. Pune’s defence had tackled Bengaluru’s main raiding duo Pawan Sehrawat and Rohit Kumar on multiple instances as early as the first half. 

“Both defences performed very well today. We lost the contest today because of our raiders. There were a lot of mistakes while raiding and even I was tackled multiple times. Hence, even though we defended well, in the end their raiders came to the fore,” Pawan Sehrawat said in the post-match press conference.

In the raiding department, the highest score amassed was seven raid points by skipper Rohit Kumar, but he also did as many as six unsuccessful raids in total of 15 attempts. Sharing the same number of unsuccessful raids was Pawan Sehrawat who managed to score only 5 raid points which is his lowest this season.

“We were a bit loose from the start itself. There was no direction to our team on the mat like there was in our last match. The plan was for me and Pawan Sehrawat to raid and get points where there were available without giving too many tackle points to the opposition. Surjeet Singh had played well in the previous match as well but that’s where we made mistakes. Our coach had warned us about his advanced tackles, but we still made the mistake and didn’t receive much support while raiding, which is why we lost,” Skipper Rohit Kumar said on team’s performance.

In defence, Amit Sheoran played well but fell one point shy of a high five and also ended with a tackle strike of 60 percent. Apart from him, only Saurab Nandal (1) and Banty (1) managed to score points in defence. Hence the whole Bengaluru defence was able to score a total of six points. There were 4 minutes left on the clock when Bengaluru Bulls were down 16-27, so in the official timeout, coach Randhir Kumar advised his team to go for a single point by reducing the deficit to seven but the team despite their best efforts were unable to do that.

“Look, we tried to reduce the deficit of the loss to at least seven points but we didn’t succeed. You never know when these extra points that one can gain from losing by less than seven points comes to use. Last year we topped our group by a few points, so that’s what we were aiming for at the end, but we weren’t successful in doing so,” skipper Rohit concluded.