Calicut Heroes cruised past a hapless Chennai Blitz side with a 3-2 (13-15, 15-8, 15-14, 15-13, 8-15) win in match 21 of the RuPay Prime Volleyball League Powered by A23 Season 2.

After a rather jittery start, losing the opening set 13-15, Calicut jumped right back into the game to win the next three rounds. Chennai, on the other hand, did get a consolation win in the final set, but that meant nothing as the Naveen Raja Jacob-led side were knocked out of the competition.

Meanwhile, a win for Calicut Heroes means the team moved back into the top three spots and are well positioned to make it to the semi-finals.

Defence the key for Calicut

Chennai Blitz made a scintillating start to the game as they went 10-6 up in no time. Calicut did try to crawl back but as it turned out, Chennai had enough fuel in the tank to win the opening round. Interestingly, everything changed in the second set and Calicut looked like a different team altogether.

Combining their well-structured attack with a sturdy defence, they pulled one back to make it 1-1. While their attacking prowess was praised by many towards the end, one cannot overlook how strong they were in defence. This can be understood by the fact that they made an impressive nine blocks throughout the game as compared to Chennai’s five.

Chennai relying on errors, again!

Chennai's reliance on unforced errors seems to be the trend of their campaign this season. Unforced errors are indeed part of the game, but if Calicut would have been a little more vigilant, the scoreline would have been extremely different.

To put things in perspective, Chennai won as many as 21 points through Calicut’s errors and the figure was a mere 11 for Calicut.

Individual brilliance made the difference

One cannot argue over the fact that Calicut seem like a well-rounded team. In fact, as many as two players in Jerome Vinith and M Ashwin Raj tallied at least 10 points. For Chennai, no player could breach the 10-point mark. In fact, the closest any player came to matching Vinith’s figures was Akhin GS who accumulated nine points. Overall, Calicut had an impressive six players who scored at least five points