The 18-year-old Lorenzo Chavanne continues to deliver for Claudio Porcel’s Balanz Capital. Today he was instrumental in helping this team defeat the defending champions, Andrey Borodin’s Park Place 10-7 in a fast game on The Queen’s Ground. Both teams were hunting their third win of the tournament and so there was plenty at stake. The super talented youngster fired through eight goals to make him the top scorer in the game. When you think that the field also featured team-mate Jeta Castagnola and Park Place captain Hilario Ulloa, this is an impressive statistic. Chavanne was, of course, brilliantly supported by Castagnola, who seems to always be in the right place at the right time and keeps hold of the ball as if he had glue on his mallet, regardless of the amount of traffic around him. The ideal team-mate and a major threat to any opposition.
Image credit: Art of Polo
The Teams:
Score Progression:
Game Statistics:
Second Match
Next up was a win for Adebayo Karim’s Shoreline who were hunting down their first victory. However, they had to take this game to the fourth overtime of the tournament. Ed Banner-Eve did the honours, firing through the winner in the seventh chukka with less than a minute left on the clock. This result must have been a huge disappointment for Jaisal Singh’s Sujan Indian Tigers. They have been playing far better than the stats imply, having narrowly lost their previous two games by one goal (Park Place) and two goals (Akasha). Ironically, the Tigers’ number four, Juan Martin Zubia, was the top scorer of the match, firing through six goals. Singh himself scored his team’s other three goals, an impressive hat-trick. Sujan Indian Tigers had managed to put some air in the score in the second (4-2) but Shoreline had taken the lead at the end of the fourth (5-4). With scores level at the end of the fifth (7-7) and again at the end of the sixth (9-9) extra time was needed to separate these two competitive teams. And it looked for a while as if that wasn’t going to be enough as it took almost the full seven minutes to find the winner. This match was played for the Richard Watt Cup, named after a former Chairman of Guards Polo Club. Colonel Watt’s son, General Sir Redmond Watt, a former five-goal player himself, presented the trophy to Adebayo Karim.
Image credit: Art of Polo
The Teams:
Score Progression:
Game Statistics:
Stats provided by https://poloreport.com/