Dharamshala, November 21: Tamil Nadu will look to add a couple of more titles as their Sub-Junior Boys and Sub-Junior Girls have entered the finals of the UTT 81st Cadet and Sub-Junior National Table Tennis Championships at the Indoor Stadium here today.
Tamil Nadu’s Preyesh Raj Suresh and Navaneeth Kutty, who will take on Delhi’s Aadarsh Om Chetri and Aditya Jain in tomorrow’s final, defeated Karnataka’s K.J. Akash 11-1, 11-5, 11-9, while the Delhi boys downed Uttar Pradesh duo of Divyansh Srivastava and Sarth Mishra 11-8, 11-9, 9-11, 11-5.
In Sub-Junior Girls final, the Tamil Nadu’s girls—Kavyashree Baskar and Nehal Venkatasamy—will clash with Maharashtra’s Taneesha Kotecha and Pritha Vartikar as the former accounted for Haryana’s Suhana Saini and Preksha Vohra 11-8, 11-3, 11-3 while the latter sent packing their B team, consisting of Ananya Chande and Arya Songadkar, 11-9, 11-6, 6-11, 11-4 in the extended semi-final.
But for a couple of semi-finals that got extended a bit, the favourites sailed through without a hassle.
On the penultimate day of the championships, the second stage singles events in Sub-Junior Boys, Sub-Junior Girls, Cadet Boys and Cadet Girls got underway. But only the top-four seeds Cadet Girls enjoyed the benefit of first-round byes. However, in Cadet Boys all top eight seeds had to start their title-campaign from the first-round onwards.
Fortunately, all top eight seeds in the Cadet Boys kept their date with destiny to move into the second as top-seeded Prayanuj Bhattacharyya of PSPBA blanked out Ahiron Bora 3-0. So did No. 2 seed P.B. Abhinand of Tamil Nadu accounted for Aayush Tanna of Gujarat, also by an identical margin to progress.
The other seeds that went through the motions included No. 3 Divyaj Rajkhowa of PSPBA, No. 4 Umesh Kumar of Tamil Nadu, No. 5 Segal Singh of PSPBA, No. 6 Dhruv Shah of Maharashtra, No. 7 Sudhanshu Mani of Delhi and No. 8. A. Jatin Dev from Telangana won against Archit Behra of Odisha. All of them posted 3-0 victories over their opponents, justifying their seeding.
Among Cadet Girls, while the top four seeds didn’t have to step on the arena, No. 5 Rupsa Ghosal of West Bengal defeated her North Beral rival Riddhi Thaiur 11-4, 11-3, 11-6 to move into the second round.
Vanshika Mudgal of Delhi, seeded No. 6, easily beat her opponent from Assam, Iavana Takuldar 11-6, 11-6, 11-4. No. 7 seed, Ditsa Roy of West Bengal blanked out Telangana’s Naoren Shriya 11-6, 12-10, 11-5 and No. 8 seed M. Hansini of Tamil Nadu downed Madhya Pradesh paddler Priya Vashishth 11-3, 11-5, 11-4 to enter the second round.
Players in all the four categories will complete their pre-quarterfinal assignments tonight before opening the concluding day affairs with the quarterfinals.
All five finals are slated for tomorrow afternoon.
