Heroes, at Home
COVERAGE · HSBC RUGBY PREMIER LEAGUE 2026 · HYDERABAD
A year after topping the table and going out in the semi-final, Hyderabad Heroes beat Mumbai Dreamers 41–17 at Gachibowli to win the second Rugby Premier League in front of their own crowd. ISJ was pitchside for finals day.
Finals day
Hyderabad had the league for a fortnight. The second season of the Rugby Premier League moved from Mumbai to the G.M.C. Balayogi Athletic Stadium in Gachibowli and ran from 16 to 28 June: six men’s franchises, 34 men’s matches, and for the first time a women’s competition, which Delhi Redz won on the Tuesday, beating Chennai Bulls 22–10.
By Sunday the men’s title had come down to the host side and the team that had started the fortnight best. The evening opened with the playoff for third, Bengaluru Bravehearts holding off the defending champions Chennai Bulls 22–19, a day after both had lost their semi-finals — the Bulls by five points to Hyderabad, the Bravehearts by two to Mumbai in one of the lowest-scoring games of the fortnight.
The final kicked off at 8.15 pm, with the Telangana chief minister A. Revanth Reddy, P.V. Sindhu and Chiranjeevi in the stands, and Rahul Bose, Rugby India’s president and the league’s commissioner, watching the property he had moved south.
Fifteen–nil
Mumbai had the ball first and did the most with it for a quarter. They had won their first five league games, built around James Turner, Guillaume Bouche and the Blitzboks pair of Ryan Oosthuizen and Sebastiaan Jobb, and they had beaten Hyderabad 12–10 in the league phase. What they could not do on Sunday was score.
The Heroes’ defence held, and then it turned the ball over. Francisco Cosculluela’s steal went through Taitaifono Tavita for the opening try; the Spaniard converted it. Manu Moreno, the captain, won the next possession and gave Shivam Shukla an easy finish. Maurice Longbottom dropped a goal in the added time before the break. Fifteen points, none against, and Mumbai had nothing to show for the possession they had started with.
The third quarter
The third quarter decided it. Tavita, who had scored twice in the semi-final, turned provider: two tries for Diego Ardao, the Uruguayan, either side of Mumbai’s first score, an Ethan McFarland try off Bouche’s pass. Shukla then sent Kevin Wekesa over out wide, and when Terio Tamani scored and converted at the start of the last quarter it was 41–5.
Turner pulled one back for the Dreamers and set up Sukumar Hembrom for a second with the clock gone, Sakiusa Siqila converting. Tamani’s boot had done the rest: three conversions to go with his try. Six tries to three; 41–17.
Mumbai had finished last in the 2025 table with a single win. A final was a long way from there. But the Heroes had beaten them 33–0 three days earlier, and on the night the gap looked the same.
The hurdle
In 2025 Hyderabad won nine of their ten league games, topped the table and went out in the semi-final. In 2026 they lost their opening match to Bengaluru, lost twice more in the league, and still finished first by a distance, with a points difference of +136 — then came back from 17–24 down against the Bulls in the semi, Moreno scoring one try and Sambit Pradhan the winner with a minute left, Longbottom converting.
“It feels really good to clear the hurdle from last year,” Moreno said after that one. After the final, with a squad that had been together for less than three weeks, DJ Forbes’s side had the trophy and ₹45 lakh in prize money; Mumbai took ₹25 lakh. Sumit Kumar Roy, the vice-captain and the most expensive Indian player at the April auction at ₹3.75 lakh, was named Indian Player of the Tournament.
Fifty-four of the 84 men in the league were internationals, and the final’s try-scorers came from Samoa, Uruguay, Kenya, Fiji and Australia. Two of them, Shukla and Hembrom, came from India. For now the first number is what sells the tickets; the second is why the league says it exists.
Photographs: Madhav Singh Dogra / Indian Sports Journal · Reported from Gachibowli, Hyderabad, 28 June 2026 · Match data: HSBC Rugby Premier League match centre.