16 year old Sharveya Samant who has just passed his 10th standard exams, Knocked out international youth player and favourite Jash Modi 3-1 in the Pre Quarter finals of Men’s singles at the MCF-TSTTA-4-Star District Ranking table tennis tournament, held at Borivali’s Mandpeshwar Civic Federation Sports Complex, late yesterday evening.
Sharveya looked confident from the very first game against his strong opponent and managed to take the first game with ease. He lost the second game, but receovered quickly to take the next two games with the help of his good services and consistent attacking power. At the most crucial stage of the match, Jash tried adjust the net himself, clearly indicating the tactics used to divert the concentration of his opponent, but that did not matter to his more focussed opponent.
In the very next Quarter final match Sharveya had to fight hard against Sanskar Basak to win that exciting match 3-3. In the 4th game with 1-2 down it looked like Sharveya had almost lost the match. But, won that game over extra points to equalize the set score 2-2. The deciding game was again a ding-dong battle between the two, but Sharveya using his effective services, attacked confidently with perfection winning this game and match.
Sharveya who started playing Table Tennis 7 years ago was first trained by Raj Angare in Goregaon. His first achievement was when he was selected to play for Maharashtra in the year 2018. He considers his yesterday’s performances as ‘the best’. Sharveya is at present being trained by Noel Pinto.
Sharveya will now take on Sagar Kasture in the 1st Men’s semi finals , while the other semi finals will be played between Chinmaya Somaiya and Raegan Albuquerque.
In the Women’s finals, the battle will be between Ananya Chande and Sampada Bhiwandkar. Both Ananya and Sampada had to struggle very hard to overcome their opponents Risha Mirchandani and Shweta Parte Nayak respectively. in five well contested games.
Like the men’s and women’s events played late yesterday evening, good competition was also noticed in today’s morning sessionof of Girls Uner 17 event. While Top seeded Divyanshi Bhowmick comfortably managed to qualify from her group for the main draw, her sister Hitangshi was fighting hard in her group matches to join her sister in the main draw. Similarly, MSL player Vaishnavi Jaiswal was also countering her opponents in her group, receiving strong support from her younger sister Vedika Jaiswal and her coach .
In one of the best challenged match in the morning session today, unseeded Anshita Tamhankar beat 2nd seeded and favourite Sana D’souza in a thrilling finish by winning 3-2 to take the No. 1 place in their group.The main draw matches for the Girls U-17 event tomorrow afternoon, along with the main draw matches of Boys U-17. Tomorrow morning session will be main draw matches of Boys and Girls U-11,U-15 events.