PTI

Gurgaon, Oct 26: Punjab broke a two-decade long title drought by winning their seventh Santosh Trophy with a thrilling 5-3 defeat of Bengal in penalty shootout here on Wednesday.

Parveen Kumar, Jaspal Singh, Narinder Singh, Daljit Singh and Harpreet Singh were on target for Punjab during the spotkicks while Suman Dutta was the unfortunate player to miss out for Bengal.

Dipendu Biswas, Sanjeev Maria and Shyam Mondal were successful in their attempts.

Punjab were the better team in the first half and did most of the attacking. They were quicker off the blocks and displayed better cohesion.

They got a free-kick outside the Bengal box in only the second minute, but Shivraj Singh failed to trouble Bengal's third choice custodian Abhra Mondal, who started between the posts as Kalyan Choubey failed to shake off his ankle injury.

Punjab's star striker Parveen Kumar was continuously troubling the defenders and showed good skills in the eighth minute to go past a couple of defenders before he was unfairly brought down.

Parveen then squandered a golden opportunity when he got at the end of a teasing cross from Daljit Singh only to miss the target with his unchallenged header.

Punjab's lively midfielder Baldeep Singh was very active down the wing and the young Amrinder Singh, who is thought very highly of by coach Jagir Singh, displayed his potential and made the loss of their talisman Manjit Singh look manageable.