GRAPH SHOWING RISE

 

 

The year that went by had more surprises than one for Indian table tennis. How I wish our paddlers continue in the same vein, if not go a step further and establish themselves a force to reckon with in the days to come.

 

But before I go on to elaborate on the successes, let me confess that our players’ outing at the Rio Olympics was far below expectations. I, for one, would like to forget the Rio episode like most followers of the sport in the country, despite the special fund benefits from the Sports Ministry and SAI!

 

Coming to the biggest surprise on international stage our teams in both sections have, for the first time, made it to the Champions Division and they are now part of the 24-team elite group. In addition, we also saw four players—Sharath Kamal, Souyajit Ghosh, Mouma Das and Manika Batra—qualify for the Olympics. This had happened for the first time ever!

 

Having achieved this major milestone, the Indians cannot relax and must aim to survive and sustain in the cutthroat competitive world.

 

For the first time in many years another woman player, Manika Batra, had come into the below 100 bracket—she is at No. 98—while Sharath Kamal, by his sheer determination, pulled himself up in world rankings to be at world No. 60, from the previous 76, after being under the shadow of Soumyajit Ghosh for a while. Ghosh, on the other hand, has gone down to No. 81 from No. 68. The best phase for him, however, was when he was conferred on the Arjuna Award.

 

One of the hot contenders in the senior section today, G. Sathiyan became the only second Indian, after Sharath Kamal, to win an ITTF Tour event when he beat Belgian Cedric Nuytinck in straight games for the Belgium Open crown in September. Sharath had won a tour event in 2012.

 

 

There were more good news about junior paddlers, especially Manav Thakkar, Ananth Devarajan and Archana Girish Kamath who had made it to the Cape Town World Juniors purely on their own strength. They have had a very good 2016 and, of course, world rankings.

 

Earlier in July, Archana claimed three titles—team, singles and doubles gold—at the ITTF Junior Circuit 2016 Morocco Open at Agadir.

 

Selenadeethi Selvakumar of Tamil Nadu als won a handful of medals in ITTF Junior Circuits. She had won gold, silver and bronze medals in singles, doubles and team events at Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Portugal and Slovak Open championships, partnering players from other countries.

 

Interestingly, some junior paddlers also made it to the world ranking list but they need to do more in their fledgling career to make it a habit of sticking their and moving up the ladder. The India Open medal sweep at Indore and our ‘Hopes’ performances are praiseworthy.

 

Our players, representing the Railways, had participated in the World Railway Games and it was a big boost to those from the institution that employs the largest number of sportspersons.

 

Indian paddlers also for the first time won a team bronze when they participated in the fifth Asian School Table Tennis Championships in Singapore in August.

 

DOMESTIC GROWTH

 

On domestic front, the performance graph is going up all the time. A look at the five national ranking events reveals fierce competition among players across all categories. Preyesh Suresh Raj and Tharun Shanmugam of Tamil Nadu have been outstanding in the Cadet section. Preyesh swept through all five titles on offer with the two often meeting in finals.

 

However, both shockingly exited in the semifinals at the Siliguri Nationals allowing Uttar Pradesh’s Divyansh Srivastava emerge out of his own shadow and crown himself as the champion. Karnataka’s Sujan Bharadwaj challenge in the final was the best thing to happen as he took the issue to the decider after being down 0-2.

 

 

Among girls, Tamil Nadu’s Kavyashree Baskar and Haryana’s Suhana Saini were the real toasts with 3-2 win-loss records against each other. But the Haryana girl, in their last meeting this season at Siliguri, had the last laugh with the national title!

 

Equally intriguing were the affairs in sub-junior sections. Anusha Kutumble of Madhya Pradesh did everything right with four zonal titles before ceding the National crown. The crestfallen girl’s face said it all when she fell in the first round itself to hitherto unknown Vidhi Ameet Shah of Maharashtra. Vidhi proved to be a giant-killer and Vanshika Bhargava of Delhi will vouch for it when she got a scare in the semifinals. But another Maharashtra youngster, Dia Chitale, who beat top-seeded Anusha for title at Rajkot, made amends to be crowned the national champion at Siliguri when she beat Vanshika, another immensely talented youngster.

 

CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME

 

The cat-and-mouse games played by sub-junior boys H. Jeho, Chinmay Somaiya, Payas Jain, Yashansh Malik and Shreyans Goel were interesting as they often shared the spoils while keeping the likes of Dev Shroff and Jayabrata Bhattacharya at bay. However, it is difficult to pinpoint the best among them as they lacked consistency.

 

Coming to Junior and Youth Boys, Manav Thakkar was by far the best among the lot. The rest like Jeet Chandra, Chinmay Somaiya, Payas Jain, Yashansh Malik, Shreyans Goel, Ronit Bhanja, Ananth Natarajan, Snehit Suravajjulu, Birde Boro, Arjun Ghosh only followed suit. It definitely showed how Manav dominated the scene, thoroughly deserving his selection by ITTF for the World Juniors.

 

 

Talent in Junior and Youth Girls reflected, more or less, a similar scenario. Archana Kamath led the way with, Moumta Datta, Priyanka Pareek, Priyadarshini Das, Amrutha Pushpak, Seleenadeepthi Selvakumar, Ayhika Mukerjee, Prapti Sen, Yashini Sivashankar and Sreeja Akula. But none of the latter capitalized when chances came their way to make it count and sustain. A classic case is that of Delhi’s Parth Virmani who, despite potential, dissipated without registering his real presence.

 

IGNORING BASE

 

Seniors like Sharath Kamal, Anthony Amalraj, G. Sathiyan and Harmeet Desai in men’s section and Madhurika Patkar, Suthirtha Mukherjee and Manika Batra in women’s singles could lay their hands on zonal titles but it was disappointing to see Soumyajit Ghosh, who was a dominant figure until last season, doing very little. In fact, he skipped all zonal events and made a token appearance in the Institutional championships earlier this year.

 

In order to prepare for the Olympics, Ghosh lost his touch with the base and trained abroad throughout. Even his pro-tour participation was limited and what he did at Rio is history now. His peers, too, followed him preferring professional leagues abroad but they entered the home stretch for some events to keep their domestic rankings intact. As a result, their consistency took a severe beating while paving the way for other contenders, including Devesh Karia, Subhajit Saha, Sanil Shetty and those on the fringe. But it is a pity that they never made most of the situation.

 

On the distaff side, Madhurika and Suthirtha had a reasonably good season with a couple of zonal titles each—Suthirtha also won the Institutional crown—while reigning national champion Manika managed just one. But former national champions Mouma Das and K. Shamini, Pooja Sahasrabuddhe, Reeth Rishya, Mousumi Paul, Krittwika Sinha Roy or, for that matter, Ankita Das were found wanting.

 

The best aspect in all these was the participation of Sharath Kamal who, starting from the scratch at Vizag, went on to win the men’s singles title. He played his first group qualifiers in 19 years and won a zonal title in six years! The 34-year-old ace paddler wants to continue until 2020 Tokyo Olympics, if he can, and has given himself a year or so to assess.

 

An icon that he has been, Sharath deserves this special consideration.

Guiding factors

 

With a strong coaching system becoming the need of the hour for good bench strength, TTFI took a conscious decision four years ago to hire foreign coaches during summer vacation to train young paddlers. Since then, the federation has been able to find a good combination of coaches and sparring partners in North Koreans who can be deputed to different states to train the children.

 

Indeed, this has started yielding results and state associations are happy with this kind of arrangements. The feedback from parents and young paddlers has been very encouraging.

 

With demands from district associations growing, TTFI had to hire two sets of coaches and sparring partners this time and they have already held coaching camps at Delhi, Dharwad, Mumbai, UP, Assam, Goa and West Bengal. There are quite a few associations on our waiting list!

 

MAX IS BACK

 

 

Meanwhile, on October 1 TTFI welcomed Italian Massimo Costantini to its fold as he took charge as the national coach. He was coming straight after successfully completing his tenure in the US—he was the US team coach at Rio Olympics. Costantini has had a fruitful stint with the Indian table tennis, having led the team to Commonwealth medals in 2010. He has been entrusted with a special job of not just coaching seniors but also devising programmes from picking right blend of juniors and helping them with proper plan charts for their trainings. All national camps involving players will see the constant presence of the Italian, a strict disciplinarian in practice sessions and a friend outside the arena.

 

SPONSORS ON BOARD

 

Ever since the federation entered into a 10-year-contract with 11Even Sports, their contribution towards the sport’s growth has come for all-round praise. Indeed, TTFI is thankful to both Mrs Vita Dani, the chairperson, and Kamlesh Mehta, the director. Their vision of popularizing the sport at grassroots took TTFI to school events at state levels—28 states participated in the event—before culminating in the school nationals which they organized at Vadodara. Incidentally, this was the second successive school nationals.

 

11Even Sports are working on their pet professional Indian league, to be conducted in June 2017, and hopefully the ball will start rolling.

 

TTFI has also brought on board HVR Sports Inc., owned by Harsha Vardhan Reddy, as associate sponsors and a 16-year agreement with HVR means a lot more are on the anvil. Our programme with them also aims at strengthening our roots at panchayat, village and district levels. HVR’s initiative in several other developmental programmes will only broaden our base and help us cast our net wider.

 

Stag International, our national teams sponsors, GKI and other equipment manufacturers have extended their helping hand throughout the season and the Airports Authority of India came with an open offer to conduct the Institutional championships this August. We feel privileged and obliged to all of them.

 

VITAL COGS

 

I must also recall the help and support that we received from state associations, particularly since our introduction of online entries. The state apparatus, now fully equipped, had stuck to the TTFI guidelines and sent entries through online. Several institutions, too, followed in the same vein helping our competition department a great deal. I must thank all state secretaries and those in charge at the institutions for their continued support.

 

For any sport to grow, two important components are vital: players and technical officials. TTFI is fortunate to have both in good measures. I have already dealt with the first in another write-up and it is time to talk about the second.

 

With Ganeshan N. Iyer leading a knowledgeable pack of three veterans in Anil Dubey, A.S. Kler and T.G. Upadhaya, it may sound cozy when conduct of events is spoken about. But it is never the case and I, as a technical hand myself, know it better than most others.

 

Ganeshan and party has been the backbone in running the entire show—from sending out prospectus to receiving online entries to compilation of final list of players, making draws, looking after result management and updating ranking lists.

 

Thanks to him, TTFI also used technology advancement to boost its image and help people connected with the game to be in touch with it all the time through YouTube. With this facility, one can view centre-court matches live during zonal and national championships. This has, understandably, brought more viewership to the TTFI conducted events. In addition, TTFI has also gone ahead with live scoring of matches on all tables of our events. Of course, we need to do some fine tuning with these as per suggestions from our viewers.

 

LIVING OUT OF SUITCASES

 

Coming back to the technical officials, they have been virtually living out of suitcase and hopping from one city to another to complete a tight schedule of events as per TTFI calendar, including international championships. No doubt, Ganeshan’s team has the assistance of Blue Badge, international and national umpires in accomplishing the tasks along with a lively website, managed by Sagar Kant Singh.

 

News reports of all championships, as has been the practice with TTFI, are disseminated to the country’s sports desks with our media manager R. Ramachandran taking care of this aspect.

 

The experienced office staff’s untiring work, as in the past years, is worth mentioning at this juncture as we wind up activities for the year. Without their understanding and cooperation it would have been rather difficult to run the day-to-day affairs of TTFI. My federation colleagues and I will always remain grateful to them.

 

Let their collective efforts bring in prosperity to the sport and organization. I wish them well in the New Year.