A player of Ranchi Football Club (yellow and blue) struggles to get a shot at the ball during the A-division Ranchi district football match played at JAP -1 grounds in Ranchi. Picture by Ashok Karan

Ranchi, Sept.22: It was a battle of the nerves between the Morabadi Football Club (MFC) and the Ranchi Football Club (RFC) teams as both displayed a brilliant ball game in their A-division soccer league match.

But interestingly, inspite of their best efforts, the match remained a draw at 1-1 as neither of the teams could score another goal to take the lead and win the match.

Played at the Jharkhand Armed Police-1 (JAP-1) grounds here today, the MFC got the first break in the very first minute of the game when they were awarded a penalty.

Thanks to the foul committed to a defender of the RFC who restricted Rajendra of MFC from moving forward, the penalty was immediately awarded to the team by the referee.

Not wasting the opportunity, the MFC in the form of Rajendra shot a brilliant left footer, which completely took the opponent goal-keeper by surprise resulting in the MFC team getting the initial lead of the match.

The RFC initiated repeated attacks after that and even came close to scoring goals on a few occasions but thanks to some brilliant goal-keeping by MFC, the first half remained at 1-0 in favour of MFC.

It took the RFC team the 20th minute of the second half to equalise in the match. After getting a brilliant through ball from a fellow player of the RFC, Chotu Kumar shot past two of the MFC defenders to take a first time shot from inside the opponent penalty box to net the ball and inturn giving his team the most needed equaliser. Although both the teams tried hard to squeeze a goal during the remaining time of the second half, none could come close to score resulting in the match remaining a draw.

AG, Jharkhand and the Green Bush, Namkum will take on each other in another match tomorrow.