UP Yoddha

U.P. Yoddha is an up and coming professional Kabaddi team from Uttar Pradesh who debuted in the Season 5 of Pro Kabaddi League, the professional Kabaddi league of India. They made a decent outing in their debut season by reaching the playoffs and will look to moving forward in the upcoming PKL 2019 season.

Background

The Lucknow based franchise is owned by the GMR League Games Private Limited and plays their home matches at the Babu Banarasi Das Indoor Stadium.

The most expensive pick was raider Rishank Devadiga in the 2018 PKL auction, who broke the Rs 1 Crore barrier when he became the third Indian to do so. UP Yoddha were keen to shell out any amount to retain him on the team. Jeeva Kumar was another player bought by the franchise with as high a price as Rs 45 Lakh while highly rated raider Prashanth Kumar Rai was bought for an astronomical fee of Rs. 79 lakh after involving in a tug of war with other franchises.

The franchise decided not to retain any more players and spend fair amount to add players to the roster which now looks like a good balance of talents and experience with the likes of young new players like Azad Singh, Arkam Shaikh, all-rounder Seong Ryeol Kim of South Korea, and Shrikant Jadhav among others.

PKL Trajectory

Playing just one season of the league, UP Yoddha has put up quite a commendable performance finishing third in their Zonal stage. They qualified to the Eliminators where they lost to Puneri Paltan 38-40.

With Rishank Devadiga heading the team, coach J Udaya Singh is positive that they will put their best feet forward this season and advance to the qualifiers and battle to stay at the top.

Low Points

In their previous season, the team was heavily dependent upon the raiding duo of Nitin Tomar and Rishank Devadiga. Other raiders failed to live up to the expectations and ended up finishing 11th in the PKL Points Table for do or die raid points.

Rajesh Narwal, the second richest buy of the season at ₹69 lakhs also failed miserably and scored only 27 points in a total of 16 games.

Their loss in the Eliminator match versus Puneri Paltans could be accounted to the poor defence which led down the team with just 8 tackle points compared to Pune's 17. Over dependability on Nitin and Rishank and a deficient defence hindered the progress in their debut season.

Team Players

Major Players for the PKL 2021:

Continuing the decision to retain Pardeep Narwal as the captain, the team signed Sumit, Nitin Panwar and Gulveer Singh.

Fresh talent this season that the team signed are Aashish Nagar, defender and Surender Gill, raider. Nitesh Kumar with his steady performance in the middle phases of the 2017 tournament and being the highest tackle points scorer for his team, is highly expected to boost the team's chance for victory in the 7th season. Whereas in crucial situations Shrikant Jadhav, Md. Masud Karim and Ankit will be the team's flamboyant hustlers.

Nitesh Kumar along side Aashish Nagar(NYP) and Amit are hopeful of holding up a strong defence with the others and an all round performance is expected from Nitin Panwar.