Mumbai fight back to level series

Chinglen Sanai, Lalith Upadhaya and Bahadhur Narad sounded the board once each when heavy rain lashed the KSHA stadium, forcing the organisers to stop the match after 50 minutes of play.

With the rain failing to cease and no play possible, KSHA officials decided to award the match to the visitors. The third match will be played on Thursday.

Host of changes
Karnataka, who made a host of changes to the squad that scored a 3-1 win on Monday in order to test their bench strength ahead of next week’s U-20 Nationals in Pune, looked completely off-colour and were thoroughly outplayed by Mumbai.

Right from the start the visitors were relentless in their attack, hardly letting Karnataka to settle down. They were unlucky on a couple of times not to get an early breakthrough, but after it came in the 27th minute their game gathered steam and they were almost unstoppable.

Mumbai went into the lead from a smartly taken penalty corner. Victo Singh’s push was stopped by Amit Gowda. Anup Walmiki then foxed the Karnataka defence by selling a dummy and rolling it to Chinglen, who smacked the ball into the goal with a crisp strike.
Upadhaya then finished off a fine passing move, scoring from the edge of the circle four minutes later before Narad struck from a penalty corner in the 45th minute.