Visakhapatnam: Most out of 40 players maintained top positions in their groups, while Mohammad Sahil from Kerala upstaged Gujarat’s Vidit Desai and Delhi’s Tejas Narag, in that order, to emerge on top of group 24 to enter the main draw of the 11Even Sports National Ranking (South Zone) Table Tennis Championships at the Rajiv Gandhi Indoor Stadium here today.
Om Jayswal of Gujarat was, however, lucky as group leader Vishwa Deenadayalan from Tamil Nadu did not turn up and it helped the paddler from Gujarat go through with just one win against Surya Teja Telidevara of Andhra Pradesh.
In Sub-Junior Girls, too, 30 paddlers retained their higher position from 32 groups while West Bengal’s Anushka Basak from group 21 and Karnataka’s Keerthi Kandaswamy from group 22 proved the exceptions to make the out-of-blue cut.
All these players will join the eight top ranked players, based on their previous performances, who have been given direct entry into the second stage. But with so many groups the draw is going to be of 64 players in these sections and all qualifiers will play two rounds of stage 2 events tonight and follow them up with four rounds on the concluding day tomorrow.
However, all eight seeded players will play first match from round 2. In fact, some lucky qualifiers will also be considered for first-round byes based on their rankings.
Delhi’s Payas Jain, the winner of Sub-Junior Boys title, in the West Zone championships at Rajkot is expected to get the top billing while it will definitely be Anusha Kutambale from Madhya Pradesh who will be seeded No. 1.
The other boys that will not make an appearance before the second round are Chinmaya Somaiya, Jeho Himnakulhpuingheta, Yashansh Malik, Dev Shroff, Shreyans Goel, Alberto Lrruata and Siddhant Sur Roy. Among the girls, Vanshika Bhargava, Tanisi Kirtani, Swastika Ghosh, Anjali Rohilla, Kajol Ramjali, Sharmistha Srinivasan and Munmun Kundu will also get first-round byes.
Both the Cadet Boys and Girls events are scheduled for tomorrow.
List of qualifiers:
Junior Boys: Jayabrata Bhattacharjee, Hrishikesh Malhotra, Aryan Panse, Deepit Patil, Karthikeyan Solaiyan, Mainik Das, Om Jayswal, Shivam Das, Abir Roy, Ayaz Murad, Harshil Kothari, Abhirup Paul Roy, Soumyadeep Sarkar, Preyesh Raj, Riswava Dey, Sudipta Chakraborty, Dhairya Parmar, Sankeet Mahipal, Krishna Jain, Abhilash Rawal, Chitrax Bhatt, Karanpalsinh Jadeja, Pratham Madlani, Mohammad Sahil, Jai Jain, Arnab Chanda, Shaswath Totager, Manav Mehta, Subhrajyoti Paul, Anuj Mahihapal, Satyamgiri Gupta, Varun Shankar, Harish Kusel, Varun Ganesh, Ashutosh Kumar, Divyansh Srivastava, Aniket Choudhury,Sourajit Halder, Tamal Ballav and Karthikeyan Kamaraj.
Junior Girls: Anjbha Bajan, Tisha Kholi, Nikita Sarkar, Sataporni De, Nithyashree Mani, Mouli Modak, Poymante Baisya, Aditi Sinha, Kalyani Dinesh, Shreya Sivakumar, Vaishnavi Vijaya Kumar, Koushiki Dasgupta, Sristi Goswami, Suhana Saini, Anargaya Manjunath, Vidhi Shah, Gayathri S, Samridhi Banik, Kavyashree Baskar, Anushka Basak, Keethi Kandaswamy, K. Anekita, Lakshita Narang, Sanskriti Malpani, Vedalakshmi Devi, Tejal Kamble, Ancy Mary, Prithoki Chakraborti, Angana Saha, Pritha Banerjee andYashaswini Ghorpde.
