Jaipur: Skipper Deepak Nivas Hudda, known more for his raiding skills came up with a sterling performance in defence to lead his team Telugu Titans to a crushing 33-22 win over title holders Jaipur Pink Panthers. While Deepak Nivas Hudda was busy utilising his frontal blocks to stop Jaipur’s dangerous Jasvir Singh, he got admirable support from Sukesh Hegde tonight at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium. Finally when Rahul Chaudhari came into his own, with a super raid which yielded three points the Titans were safe and running towards a well-deserved victory. The half-time score of 8-7 was ample evidence of the slow pace of the contest early on. With this win, Titans maintain their second place with 20 points. This was the fourth defeat in a row for Jaipur, a worrying statistic indeed for the defending champions

The first half belonged to Sukesh Hegde of the Titans while Jasvir Singh, of the Panthers, surprisingly went without a point. In fact, the smiling assassin known for his ‘scorpion kicks ‘ failed to score till his tenth raid, a dubious record which he would like to forget very soon. The Titans inflicted their first ‘lona’-all out immediately after the break. It took Rahul Chaudhari to inflict the all out on the last two men standing for the Panthers to get into his scoring mode. He had been out from action for almost 14 minutes till then. The score at that stage was 14-7 after his successful raid

The hosts tried to get back through some spirited play from Kuldeep Singh but he too could not revive the fortunes despite help from Rajesh Narwal. As Deepak Nivas Hudda had indicated before the match that they were well prepared to take on the holders after studying their tapes, the Titans truly and effectively employed the strategy on the field. Jasvir Singh was rendered ineffective and when he threatened briefly with his trademark kicks to get rid of D Gopu and Iranian Meraj Sheykh but that was too late and less.

The Jaipur defence was in shambles as Navneet Gautam and Prashant Chavan, the left and right corners failed to do anything right. Jaipur leaked points in both departments to face another all out. Their hopes of at least salvaging a point also vanished. The gap (29-17) was too big to bridge with five minutes on the clock.

Talking about their side’s dismal run so far in Season 2, captain Navneet Gautam displayed extreme sadness at how his team were faring so far. “We are unable to figure out what is going wrong so far. Maybe we need to re-evaluate our basics and maybe we need to figure out what is going wrong in our practice. I’m being attacked for our losses and the team is being attacked for being poor. But this is sport and in sport, no one can be perfect all the time. You have good days and bad days. So far, we have had bad days. But we will have good days very soon.”