Manav gets top billing; 24 qualifiers get first-round bye

Agra, November 5, 2014: PSPB Academy’s Manav Thakkar, the winner of the East Zone championships at Durgapur, is seeded No. 1 in the Sub-Junior Boys section of the LIC National Ranking (North Zone) Table Tennis Championships at the Eklavya Indoor Stadium here today.

The other seeded players include Jeet Chandra, the runner-up at Durgapur, Manush Shah of Gujarat and Sarthak Seth of UP, both of whom had entered the semifinals at the zonal, are seeded behind Jeet in that order. Maharashtra’s Ashwin Subramanian, Delhi Parth Virmani and Shaurya Pednekar, also of Maharashtra, follow them to be the top-eight ranked players who were given direct entry in the main draw.

Though they have joined the 32 qualifiers from as many groups, the top eight paddlers will have first-round bye along with 24 group leaders in main draw while the others will begin their campaign from the first round itself.

As expected, in many groups the leaders who were drawn to play the qualifiers on the basis of their ranking, led while in a few there were some surprise winners. For instance, Chithresh Gurumurthy from Tamil Nadu emerged on top from the bottom of group 18 as he won three of his matches, including the one against original group leader Satyam Giri Gupta of Uttar Pradesh.

So did Haryanba’s Ayush Tayal who won two of his matches against Delhi’s Manik Singh Ahluwalia 3-2 and beat Darsh Udawat of Rajasthan 3-0 and got a walkover from group leader Soham Bhattacharya of West Bengal. Another surprise pack of qualifier was Telengana’s Varun Sharnkar who, bunched in group 31 with three others, made it to the main draw as he managed to beat Hardik Paliwal of UP in straight games.

Other UP boy who bowed out in the group stage included Parth Katyal in group 9, Subroto Raj Verma in group 10, Utkarsh Arora in group 1, Parth Belwal in group 12, Ujjwal Roy in group 13, Abhishek Pathak in group 14 and Adarsh Srivastava in group 16.

However, hopes were rested on Satyam Giri, whose previous performances in national ranking championships, pitch forked him to get the top place in group 18. Though he won a couple of matches, Satyam lost the crucial match to the Tamil Nadu boy which saw his ouster.

The 32 qualifiers will join the top-eight ranked players who got direct entry into the main draw. But there will be no respite for these players who will play two rounds of knockout matches tonight. The Cadet sections’ matches have also begun and they will also play their main draw tomorrow.

But a few girls from UP should make it to the main draw of the Sub-Junior Girls which would be the bright spot for the host state. However, the main draw events in the section will start only tomorrow when four medals will also be decided in Cadet Sub-Junior categories.

A TTFI Press release