Kool Smashers led by Mr. Cool Sanil Shetty put up a good fight back to recover and beat in form MTC Royals 5-4 in the semi finals of the 2nd edition of the iProspect-Mumbai Super League (MSL) Table Tennis Championship organized by 11Even Sports and played at the NSCI on Sunday morning. Kool Smashers, despite presence of Sanil Shetty were down 2-4 at one stage, but the 7th match of Sr. Men’s doubles proved very crucial for them.
Kool Smashers players with their Coach and Owner
Sanil partnering veteran Kiran Salian faced the tough opposition from Noel Pinto & Prakash Kelkar. At the set score of the match 1-1 , the third game was stretched to match point, when both the teams used power play. At the score 15-15 , MTC Royals players argued with Umpire and Referee over awarding a point in favour of Kool Smashers. They were even joined by their team mates, who protested. Finally, the adjudicator had to step in to remind them that Umpire’s decision was final.
But, during this break, Sanil Shetty kept himself cool. Though Kool Smashers lost this game on 16-18, they recovered to beat their hasty opponents in next two games, to win this crucial match and reducing margin of set score to 3-4. Inspired by their captain’s performance, in the next match of Jr. Mixed doubles, Kool Smashers pair of Tanmay Rane and Krish Agarwal scored a fluent 3-0 victory over MTC’s Parthav kelkar & Pranjal Shinde to equalise the set score 4-4. The deciding match saw a ding dong battle between Kool Smasher’s Kiran Salian and MTC’s Prakash Kelkar. But, Kiran not losing his cool, managed to win the decider and match for his team, which enabled Kool Smashers to move into Finals.
In the second Semi Finals, Ace spearheaded by Omkar Torgalkar began very well winning their first three matches with Omkar scoring much deserved 3-2 win over Ravi Kotian, with good support coming from Ashlesha Trehan and Shivam Das, winning their respective singles matches. But, surprisingly Ace players lost all their subsequent 5 matches, including the three doubles matches and conceding the match 5-3 to Supreme Fighters.
Now, it will be interesting to see, how favourites Kool Smashers plan their strategy against Supreme Smashers ? Much depends on their doubles matches against Supreme Fighters, who have proved themselves good as best doubles combinations.