Mohit Nayak’s Brace Seals It: Mainpat Titans Beat Strikers 4-2 to Win the First Chhattisgarh Hockey League
Revenge is sweet, and Mainpat Titans took theirs on the biggest night of the season. The Titans beat Sanskardhani Strikers 4-2 in Raipur on Sunday to win the first ever Chhattisgarh Hockey League, just days after the Strikers had thumped them 4-0 in their last league meeting. Finals are a different animal, and this one belonged to Mohit Nayak.
It started badly for the Titans. Sanskardhani’s Ashish Tani Purti, the tournament’s top scorer, missed a stroke against goalkeeper Alfaz Khan, but the Strikers still struck first. Abhishek Yadav, who would later take the Striker of the Match award, scored off a rebound from a penalty corner with a reverse flick in the dying minutes of the first quarter. 1-0 Strikers, and the packed crowd at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Hockey Stadium had a game on its hands.
Mainpat hit back in the second quarter. Sandeep Kumar slipped a lovely pass in from just outside the circle and Prahalad Rajbhar feathered it home to make it 1-1. Then Sandeep himself converted a penalty corner in the third quarter to put the Titans 2-1 up. The lead did not last long. Ashish failed from yet another penalty corner, but with the ball still alive in the circle, Sarikh Ahmed smashed it home to level at 2-2.
That is where finals are won and lost, and Mohit Nayak decided it. Marked tightly in the circle, he still found room to guide a tomahawk into the top left corner to make it 3-2. Then, in the dying seconds, he scored a field goal to settle it at 4-2. Player of the Match, and no argument about it.
For the Strikers, the story of the night was Ashish’s nightmare from set pieces. A missed stroke, missed penalty corners, and no way back once Mohit caught fire. They had been the surprise package of the tournament, beating the Titans 4-0 in the league and then hammering the Knights 6-3 in the semi-final. But finals do not care about your last result.
The bigger picture is what this league was for. Organised by the Chhattisgarh government’s Department of Sports and Youth Welfare and sanctioned by Hockey India, the 12-day tournament gave 108 local players the chance to share a pitch with names like Pradeep Mor, Shamsher Singh, Lalit Upadhyay, Yuvraj Walmiki, Chinglensana Singh, Surender Kumar and SV Sunil. Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai, Union Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya and Deputy Chief Minister Arun Sao watched the final and handed over the trophy.
The prize pool was Rs 21 lakh, with Rs 11 lakh for the Titans and Rs 6 lakh for the runners-up. The tournament awards told their own story: Shahrukh Ali was Player of the Tournament, Ashish took the Top Scorer award with 13 goals, Himanshu was Best Goalkeeper, Mohit was named Best Chhattisgarh Player, and Sandeep Kumar took the Emerging Player (U-21) award. That is a decent haul of young talent for one first season.
So the first CHL ends with the Titans as champions, the Strikers as the nearly men, and a league that actually delivered what it promised: a stage for Chhattisgarh’s players. The question now is whether season two can build on it, because the standard has been set.
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https://sportscursor.com/mohali-act-knockouts-semis-4-november-final-5-november-2026/
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