By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, April 14: A huge contingent of the country’s top table tennis players will battle it out in the 83rd Senior National Table Tennis Championship scheduled to begin here, on Monday.
The national championship will take place at the Sports Authority of India (SAI) Indoor Training Centre in the North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) campus and will see star paddlers including Manika Batra, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Sutirtha Mukherjee and Achanta Sharath Kamal in action.
Meghalaya, meanwhile, will be represented by a team of 14 players, including North East Olympics 2018 gold medallist Tanushree Das Gupta.
In a press briefing on Thursday, Meghalaya Table Tennis Association (MTTA) vice-president and chairman of the competition’s Organising Committee, Bruce P Marak, informed that this is one of the biggest sporting events Meghalaya has held.
Around 450 paddlers along with 200 coaches, Table Tennis Federation of India officials among others will attend the event. The national TT team will be selected based on the players’ performances here.
On the city’s preparedness for the event,oOrganising secretary and MTTA general secretary Chiranjib Choudhury said that the Technical Director of the TTFI has been in Shillong for some time now and he is confident that the event will go off successfully.
Marak, meanwhile, added that he is confident the players will return satisfied and added that spectators are welcome at the venue, although space could be restricted because of the number of teams, players and support staff.
Meghalaya will feature seven men and seven women in the squad. The men’s list includes Suranjit Dey, Anubhav Dutta, T Yogesh Singh, Rituraj Shabong, Z Somiyar, Sumesh Gareri and Prithvi Dey, while the women’s contingent comprises Tanushree Das Gupta, Camelia Diengdoh, Anwesha Choudhury, Wanpyntngen Lyngdoh, Diva Tang, Chuana R Marak and Badaihun Diengdoh.
“I feel we will do reasonably well,” Choudhury said. “We had high expectations in January but then the players’ flow was stopped because of Covid. They have been putting in their best efforts and the MTTA is hopeful.”
