Ismaila Umaru Lere
12 October 2008
Alhaji Tajudeen Aminu Dantata has been named Patron of the Year 2008 by Polo Aficionado.The Lagos-based publica-tion gave the Kano tycoon the nod ahead of other fancied contenders such as Muhammad Babangida and Abubakar Kari in its latest annual awards.
For triumphing in this very elite category of polo's biggest and best, Dantata will get the premier listing in the 2009 Polo Aficionado Yearbook due out November.
Predictably, too, Dantata's team, Titans also scooped the Team of the Year award, the crowning achievement after a spectacular 2007/2008 season in which it decimated the the entire medium goal field on the way to winning in Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Katsi-na. With no other credible oppo-sition left, the audacious Titans even moved up the next level to challenge mighty El-Amin in the High Goal Emir of Katsina Cup in Kano. In as much as the Team of the Year vote was near una-nimous, El-Amin did come very close after taking all the High Goal trophies in the country with the exception of that elusive Charity Shield.
Nevertheless, the outcome was always inevitable; Titans burned up the pitch across the country in a long and hard driving campaign in which the team - Tajudeen Dantata, Abba Sule, Ibrahim Abdu and Yusuf Katako often made it look rather easy-going in overcoming some very robust and rampant opposition.
With the versatile Abdu pivo-ting play from the mid field, it was typically Tajudeen and Abba Sule in forward positions who defined the pace of Titans' legen-dary running game that all too often fazed their rivals and expo-sed benign weaknesses.
In confirming the Team of the Year winners, Polo Aficionado affirmed that the "Titans is a very organised and very fast team with rhythm and substantial hor-sepower... Critically they have managed to achieved a rare team rapport and the ability to control their game, keep their back posi-tions tight and run the ball unre-lentingly".
Although the Kano Polo Club also boasts a good pool of equal-ly fast and robust players, they somehow always found it hard-going when and where it really mattered and could never quite put it well enough together to dominate any season until now.
"Tajudeen Dantata's palpa-ble passion to make his mark in the sport he's put in so much clearly energised him to finally find the right combination of players and the mount to turn a Kano team into national cham-pions", cited Polo Aficionado in its choice of the Titans boss as Patron of the Year.
In another high profile award, Polo Aficionado named the 2008 Emir of Katsina Charity Shield as Tournament of the Year.
The publication noted: " the Charity Shield was awesome... with over 30 foreign players it proved to be a truly interna-tional tournament and now a permanent fixture on the natio-nal social calendar".
Few would argue with the choi-ce of the mega event which also paraded an unprecedented num-ber of first class emirs who came to felicitate with the new emir of Katsina in his first official enga-gement outside Katsina since his ascension to the throne.
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