Telangana men in quarters
Telangana men reached the quarterfinals of the UTT
81st Senior National & Inter-State Table Tennis Championships being held at the Saroornagar Indoor Stadium here, on Tuesday.
They thereby qualified for the National Games.
On the second day of the tournament, Telangana defeated Maharashtra ‘B’ quite comfortably with a 3-0 scoreline.
SFR Snehit got the team off a good start as he won against Bhavesh Apte 3-1 (611, 11-2, 12-10, 15-3). Then, Aman Balgu defeated Ashwin Subramaniam 3-1
(11-6, 11-4, 11-13, 11-9) before Mohammed Ali rounded it off by beating Jash Dalvi 32 (9-11, 11-9, 8-11, 11-5, 11-9). However, the women lost to Tamil Nadu 1-3. Varuni Jaiswal began well by blanking Shanmathi Sathyamoorthy 3-0 (11-7, 115, 11-7) but Monica Manohar went down to
Selenadeepthi Selvakumar
2-3 (5-11, 11-4, 13-11, 11-13, 1113). Pranitha Garlapati too could not pull off a win, and lost to Kowshika Venkatesan 2-3 (9-11, 11-3, 411, 11-9, 8-11) as Telangana slipped to 1-2. Varuni then lost to Selenadeepthi in the reverse singles 1-3 (7-11, 511,
11-7, 8-11) to hand the tie to Tamil Nadu.
Earlier in the day, the Telangana men and women’s teams reached the main draw of the team event with ease. Having won two matches each on
Day-1, the men and women defeated Himachal Pradesh 3-1 and 3-0 respectively to be group toppers.
As the PSPB players, who had to come from Portugal after playing in Olympic team qualification, arrived in the evening, the prequarterfinals got delayed. Sathiyan and Sharat Kamal have now arrived.