Bengaluru, September 4, 2012: On a hectic day where 422
matches had to be gone through, 40 junior boys and 36 junior girls entered
Stage 2 of the Indian Oil Servo National Ranking (South Zone) Table Tennis
Championships at the Sree Kanteerava Indoor Stadium here today. They will be
playing the main draw matches later tonight with the finals in both sections
are slated for tomorrow evening.
As for the Cadet boys’ and girls’ singles, a clear picture
will emerge only after all the three qualifying rounds of group matches get
over later tonight. With 148 (81 boys and 67 girls) having entered the two
categories, the boy and girl paddlers were drawn into 24 and 22 groups,
respectively.
This meant that all of them had to play each other in groups
of three rounds to make it to the second stage where 24 boys and 22 girls form
the draw of 32 which are slated for tomorrow.
Among the 40 sub-junior boys who qualified to join the
directly seeded players, four boys belong to the host state—G.S. Sanket,
Abhijit Saralaya, R.B. Rakshit and Suchet Shenoy. Nearly two dozen group
matches were taken to the full distance. Sanket, in fact, lost to Sandeep
Choudhary of UP 8-11, 7-11, 11-3, 11-3, 3-11 and Saralaya, played his heart out
to qualify after having been stretched by Shivam, also of UP, 11-7, 11-8,
10-12, 9-11, 12-10.
Subham Ambre of Maharashtra qualified after seeing off a
valiant Karnataka’s G. Sudeep. After winning the first game at 19-17, exhausted
as he was, he conceded two straight games at 7-11, 7-11 only to pick up the next
two games 11-6, 11-6 to help his cause.
In the Stage 1 matches in sub-junior girls, 11 went to the
wire with Manasi Deshpande of Maharashtra (11-8, 5-11, 11-8, 11-13, 11-9) had
to play two full matches, first against S. Rathnavalli of Tamil Nadu and the
second against Treesa Cherian of Kerala (11-6, 8-11, 11-9, 7-11, 11-7) to enter
the main draw.
In the other matches, Karnataka’s Sejal Kaushik fought to
win the first match against Neha of Punjba but failed to progress as she lost
her next match in the group. However, Priya Rao, who scored a straight 11-8,
11-6, 11-4 win against Advita Bhatia of UP, struggled against Nandini Menon of
Kerala to win in five sets of 11-8, 12-10, 9-11, 8-11, 11-6 and made it to the
round of 64. Another Karnataka girl who made it to the main draw was M.V.
Spoorthy who defeated Delhi ’s
Vanshika Sachar 11-7, 11-7, 11-9. Luckily for her, she was drawn in a
three-player group and with a walkover, she simply qualified.
Earlier, R.K. Arora,
Executive Director, Indian Oil Corporation inaugurated the meet. The other
guests of honour present were former Indian pace bowler Javagal Srinath, who is
also the secretary of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and Venkat
Nageshwar, General Manager, SBI, Bengaluru.
A TTFI Press release
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