By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: India managed to clinch all the ten gold medals to emerge overall champions at the SAF Junior Table Tennis Championship which concluded here on Tuesday.
The Indian paddlers had won six gold medals at stake on Monday and followed it up with a clean sweep on the final day of the championship at the indoor stadium of the Jawaharlal Nehru Sports Complex.
The Indian contingent ended the championship with ten Gold and four silver medals.
Such was the dominance of the Indian paddlers that the SAF event became a completely one-sided affair.
The four finals on Tuesday featured Indian finalists in both the singles events in the boys and girls sections as well as in the Cadet category. The crowd which had gathered for the final events were divided in their opinion on which of the Indian players would outplay their counterparts to emerge winners.
In the junior boy’s final, second seeded Abhishek Yadav upset number one seed Sudhanshu Grover in a hard fought contest by four games to two.
The number one seed started off in an electrifying manner as he went on to clinch the first game 12-10. After losing the first game, the second seed came very out very strong to win the second game 11-7. In the third game, Grover comes back very strongly after trailing behind 6-9. The number one seed went on to win the third game 11-9.
Yadav was totally a different player from the fourth game onwards as he went to win the Gold after clinching the remaining three games 11-4, 11-4 and 11-7.
The junior girl’s final also saw an closely fought contest as Reeth Tennison overcame her own team compatriot Mallika Bhandarkar 4-3 (10-12, 11-7, 11-5, 6-11,11-7, 11-13, 11-4) in the best of seven finals.
Though Mallika, trailing 6-10, came back to win the first game 12-10, but the next two games went Reeth’s way. From there, the fortunes kept changing with the players taking a game each to drag it to the decider in which the Tamil Nadu girl won comfortably in the end for her first international title.
In junior boys’ doubles, Abhishek Yadav and Sudhanshu Grover combined together to beat the Nepalese pair of Mani Lama and Anish Shrestha 3-0 while Reeth and Mallika paired to win the junior girls’ doubles beating the Sri Lankan duo of Ruvini Sankalpana and Chandima Madushani by an identical margin.
In the Cadet boys’ category Utkarsh Gupta won in straight games against Birdie Bora while in the girls’ category Karnam Spoorthy emerged triumphant against Sutirtha Mukherjee in a gruelling final.
Even Spoorthy was in a somewhat similar situation against Sutirtha in the Cadet final before winning gold with a 3-2 verdict. In the see-saw final, Spoorthy was leading 10-6 in the decider but Sutirtha launched a fine attack to level the score at 10-all. However, it was Spoorthy who kept her cool to win the crucial two points to take the match 3-11, 11-7, 11-13, 11-7, 13-11.