Manush Shah from Gujarat wins national sub-junior TT title

Kolkata

Gujarat’s Manush Shah beat state mate Soham Pandya 4-0 and Maharashtra’s Manushree Patil defeated North Bengal’s Nikita Sarkar 4-3 to clinch the sub-hunior boys’ and girls’ singles titles respectively at the 77th Cadet and Sub-Junior National Table Tennis Championships here on Monday.

Earlier, Tamil Nadu’s Vishwa Deenadayalan kept his top billing intact and beat Delhi’s Payas Jain to win his first Cadet Boys singles gold. What Payas couldn’t do, Lakshita Narang did for Delhi, blanking out qualifier Ambika Gupta from Uttar Pradesh 4-0 at the Netaji Indoor Stadium.

Manush and Soham claimed the sub-junior doubles title to make it a very profitable outing for themselves and Gujarat.

They beat Petroleum Sports Promotion Board’s (PSPB) Jeho and Alberto Leruata 3-1. The Gujarat boys had also lifted the team trophy earlier. The Sub-Junior girls’ doubles went to Delhi’s Ishita Gupta and Amiesha Dhall, who thrashed top seeded Maharashtra pair of Manushree Patil and Swastika Ghosh 3-1.

In Cadet Boys, only the first four seeds survived to enter semifinals while the rest fell by the way in the quarters. But the biggest surprise was in Cadet Girls as top seed Kavyasree Baskar from Tami Nadu bit the dust in the quarterfinals.

Two other Tamil Nadu seeds — Nehal Suriya Narayanan (5) and Sathvika Venkata Chalapathi (8) — followed her apart from No.4 seed Suhana Saini (Haryana), West Bengal’s Prithoki Chakraborty (6) and Maharashtra’s Kheya Shah (7).

In Cadet Boys, the final battle will be between Delhi’s Payas and Tamil Nadu’s Vishwa Deenadayalan, who beat state mate Varun Ganesh in straight games. In Cadet Girls, left-hander Ambika Gupta from Tamil Nadu defeated Sathvika to earn a final meeting against Lakshita Narang of Delhi, who defeated Karnataka’s Anargaya Manjunath 3-0.

IANS