KOCHI: In the end, it was another day of shame for Indian football as Goa came through from an incident-filled match against Manipur 1-1 and Punjab scored over Tamil Nadu 2-0 in an insipid encounter to fill the remaining two semifinal berths in the Air India Express-60th Santosh Trophy at the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium here on Thursday.

While the drawn result helped Goa to qualify from Group B on account of its better goal-average than Manipur, Punjab made the grade by exactly complying to the need of the hour as Karnataka would have otherwise qualified from Group D, if the last year's runner-up's victory margin had been anything short.

Positive display

Coming as it is after the lackluster Punjab-Tamil Nadu encounter, the Goa-Manipur match was quite a refreshing affair, at least at the start, as the two sides came up with a positive display in their bid to outwit one another. With the two teams engaging a man-to-man defence, there was of course very little of goal-bound moves almost all through.

But still, the creativity that the sides displayed in keeping their slates clean with a speedy display was clearly a welcome change even though there were quite a few incidents when tempers got frayed. A classical example of this being the incident that led both the teams to be reduced to ten men soon after the first quarter hour.

Tense situation

Goa was awarded a free-kick when Clifford Miranda was brought down near the middle by a rival player. And as the Goans were preparing themselves to utilise this dead-ball situation, Nicolau Borges in an attempt to position himself inside the Manipur box unnecessarily created a tense situation as he punched Manitombi Singh on the latter's face. Soon, the Manipur players crowded Borges and the Goans also ran up to save their colleague.

In the ensuing melee, Sushil Kumar Singh of Manipur retaliated as he fouled Goan forward Freddy

Mascarenhas sending the latter reeling down on the turf. The ugly incident then threatened to turn into a free-for-all but for the quick and alert intervention of the match referee, Shaji C. Kurian and his assistants.

Both Borges and Sushil Kumar Singh were red carded thus reducing the two teams to ten men. But the unfortunate episode was not to have a bearing through the rest of the first-half. The match situation remained the same on resumption as the robust Goans and the wiry Manipuris continued with determination.

Shameful incident

Goa looked slightly better off as it brought off two goal-bound moves in quick succession before another shameful incident took the sheen out of the match.

Manipur, once and for all, looked to have sealed the match in its favour as Tomba Singh put it ahead with a brilliantly converted free-kick, almost 20 yards from the Goa goal with three-minutes remaining. The Goans rushing to the middle before the Manipur players had taken their position restarted the game and drew level through Climax Lawrence, who sprinting unchallenged found little difficulty in planting the ball in the Manipur net past the goalkeeper Ingobi Singh.

Not surprisingly the entire Manipur team protested by crowding the referee, who as television replays later showed was pushed by Manitombi Singh. This led the police personnel present at the venue to intervene before the match was resumed after a five-minute delay.

Earlier, Punajb topped Group B as it defeated Tamil Nadu 2-0, exactly the same margin by which it was expected to win to shunt out Karnataka, which had finished its engagements with four points. Gyan Moyon and substitute Charanjit Singh were the scorers for the winner, which finished with a plus-one goal-average better than Karnataka.

Friday's fixture (first semifinal): Kerala v Maharashtra, 7 p.m.

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