Allied Bank, Habib Metro Lions/Master Paints carved out contrastive wins in the Samba Bank Lahore Open Polo Championship 2017 matches played here at the Lahore Polo Club (LPC) ground on Thursday. Allied Bank defeated Green Orchard/Rijas 7-6 in a closely-contested first match of the day. Saqib Khan Khakwani pumped in six goals out of seven for Allied Bank while the remaining one was converted by Mumtaz Abbas Niazi. From Green Orchard, Geoffredo slammed in four goals while Ahmed Zubair Butt and Shoukat Ali contributed one goal apiece.
Green Orchard/Rijas dominated the first two chukkers of the match as they scored one goal in the first chukker through Geoffredo, who struck the second goal in the beginning of the second chukker while Shaukat Ali thwarted the third one to give his team 3-0 lead. Saqib then opened the account of Allied Bank by firing a fabulous field goal to make it 3-1. Ahmed Zubair further increased Green Orchard lead to 4-1. Allied Bank then bounced back in style and hammered a hat-trick of goals through Saqib (two goals) and Mumtaz Abbas (one goal) to level the score 4-4. In the fourth and decisive chukker, it were once again Green Orchard who converted two more goals to take 6-4 lead and were looking favourites to win the encounter but Saqib Khakwani came from behind and thwarted three back-to-back field goals to win the match for Allied Bank with narrow 7-6 margin.
In the second encounter of the day, Habib Metro Lions/Master Paints thrashed Barry's 7-0. Hamza Mawaz Khan was top scorer from the winning side with his tremendous three goals while Edward Banner banged in a brace, and Aun Rizvi and Ahmed Bilal scored one goal each. Aun Rizvi slammed in the opening goal of the match to give Habib Metro 1-0 lead which was further enhanced to 4-0 by Hamza, Edward and Ahmed - who all struck one goal apiece. Hamza then banged in a brace to further stretch the team's lead to 6-0 while Edward fired a field goal to give Habib Metro 7-0 lead, which remained intact till the end of the match as no more goal was struck in the third and fourth chukker of the match. Mumtaz Abbas and Shaukat Ali Malik were the field umpires.