India hopes to complete on the rostrum in Asian TT Cship

Manika Batra, Indian desk tennis star, in dialogue with India head coach and international knowledgeable Massimo Costantini in Bhubabaneswar on Friday, the eve of the twenty eighth Asian Table Tennis Team Championship. | Photo Credit: Amol Karhadkar

The final time top-flight desk tennis got here to Odisha — the unofficial capital of India’s sporting occasions — lockdown wasn’t a part of each day vocabulary, the state was nonetheless underneath regional rule, A. Sharath Kamal was Indian sport’s poster boy, and Cuttack had simply hosted the 2019 Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships.

Six years on, the game returns to the state, this time to Bhubaneswar, with the twenty eighth Asian Table Tennis Team Championships. The Kalinga Indoor Athletics Stadium will play host to greater than 300 delegates from 22 Asian nations over 5 days beginning Saturday. The world’s top-ranked paddlers — Sun Yingsha and Wang Manyu amongst ladies, Wang Chuqin and Lin Shidong amongst males — headline a area brimming with world-class expertise.

Though the occasion serves as a qualifier for subsequent 12 months’s World Championships in London, India’s males’s and girls’s groups have already sealed direct qualification. The focus, subsequently, can be on defending the dual bronze medals received in 2023 — a activity that may take a look at the hosts’ depth and resolve.

The males’s squad, led by the bespectacled duo of Manush Shah and Manav Thakkar, faces a stern quarterfinal in opposition to Hong Kong on Tuesday. In the ladies’s camp, with Sreeja Akula sidelined by a shoulder damage, Manika Batra will depend on Diya Chitale to maintain India’s medal hopes alive.

The seedings: Men: China, Chinese Taipei, Korea Republic, India, Japan, Hong Kong (China).

Women: Japan, China, Hong Kong (China), India, DPR Korea, Korea Republic.

Quarterfinal line-up: Men: Japan vs DPR Korea, Q1 vs India, Hong Kong (China) vs Republic of Korea, Q2 vs China.

Women: China vs Q1, Japan vs Republic of Korea, India vs Hong Kong (China), Q2 vs Chinese Taipei.

Qualifier teams: Women: Group A: Thailand, Mongolia, Sri Lanka.

Group B: Singapore, Kazakhstan, Maldives.

Group C: Chinese Taipei, Uzbekistan, Macau (China), Bangladesh

Group D: Malaysia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal.

Men: Group A: Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan.

Group B: Iran, Mongolia, Maldives.

Group C: Singapore, Uzbekistan, Oman.

Group D: Malaysia, DPR Korea, Macau (China).