Seeded players
The procession of seeded players out of the 11Sports national ranking championship (North Zone) continued on Tuesday and Wednesday with top-seeded Anthony Amalraj shown the door at the Gautam Buddha University hall in Greater Noida near here.
Abhimanyu Mitra of West Bengal packed off Amalraj 12-10, 11-13, 10-12, 12-10, 11-5, 7-11, 11-4 in the round of 32 on Tuesday and on the day, seventh and eight seeds Abhishek Yadav and Sourav Saha along with women’s top seed Pooja Sahasrabudhe, no. 4 Madhurika Patkar and no. 6 Archana Kamath were all ousted.
Former national champions Mouma Das and Poulomi Ghatak too failed to advance, losing to younger challengers.
The drift was arrested as no. 2 seed Sutirtha Mukherjee accounted for Sreeja Akula 4-3 to move into the women semi-finals as did third seed Manika Batra who overcame fifth seed Ankita Das 4-2. But sub-junior Vanshika Bhargava of Delhi, who cleaned up fourth seed Madhurika Patkar 4-0 in the earlier round, fought all the way before losing 3-4 to Mousumi Paul while Divya Deshpande had the easiest (4-1) victory, against Amrutha Pushpak of RBI.
The day definitely belonged to Vanshika. After disposing of Madhurika, she on took Mousumi and went 1-0 up straightaway. But the experienced PSPB paddler steadied herself to take a 3-1 lead before Vanshika inched her way back into the match to level scores. In the end, though, Mousumi prevailed.
The men singles quarter-finals went along expected line except for fifth seed Raj Mondal upsetting Subhajit Saha, the third seed, 4-1. He will now take on Sushmit Sriram who beat Anirban Ghosh 4-2 while in the second Manav Thakkar, who defeated Sudhanshu Grover 4-2, will meet Arjun Ghosh, who beat Devesh Karia 4-1.