Fancied players move into pre-quarterfinals

Petroleum Sports Promotion Board's Abhishek Yadav posted an easy win in the youth boys singles as he moved into the pre-quarterfinals of the 76th Junior National and Youth Table Tennis Championships at the Radha Convention Centre here today.
Yadav, who was a semifinalist in the last edition at Guwahati, lost to the eventual winner G Sathiyan, who is not competing here.
The southpaw defeated Gujarat's qualifier Hash Sachanandani 3-1 (6-11 11-3 11-6 11-8), while No. 2 Sudhanshu Grover, also of PSPB, beat Abhilash Bora of Assam 3-1 (12-10 11-7 7-11 11-6), even as other top eight players joined them in the last-16 stage.

But it was a bit of struggle for Sanish Ambekar, who was a star in Maharashtra's Youth Boys team title, as Karantaka's Akshay Mahanta stretched him the full distance. In the end, Ambekar won 10-12 11-8 11-8 9-11 11-7.
But Ravindra Kotiyan had no such problem as he beat Tamil Nadu's Divakar Kishore 13-11 11-8 11-4 as did Delhi's Utkarsh Gupta, who downed Gujarat's Soham Pandya 11-3 11-5 11-6.
In the Youth Girls section, seeded players had it easy as PSPB's Manika Batra, Reeth Rishya, Senhora D'Souza and Archana Kamath, AAI's Amrita Pushpak, Gujarat's Fremaz Chipia, West Bengal's Rupsa Bhattacharya and Trisha Das, Maharashtra's Mallika Bhandarkar, Charvi Kawle, Shireen Inamdar, Rutuja Khopkar and Srushti Halengadi, Telangana's Varuni Jaiswal, Tamil Nadu's Abhinaya Ramesh, Kerala's Mariya Rony moved into the pre-quarterfinals.

Except for a few matches, where the winners were stretched, the rest eased past their challengers without any trouble.

In Junior Boys, Delhi's Himanshu Jindal put it across West Bengal's Abhimanyu Mitra after being down by two games. The Delhi boy won 4-11 8-11 11-8 11-8 11-1.
Yet another match that went down to the wire was between Shivam Shrivastava and Suresh Nikhil of Tamil Nadu in which the later won 9-11 11-6 5-11 11-9 11-6 to enter the pre-quarterfinals.
But the other matches were almost a one-sided affair with the fancied players going through to the next stage.