In a rare occurrence, national champion and top-seed Manav Thakkar was involved in a two-way tie and had to wait for a while before making the main draw of the cadet boys singles at the India Junior and Cadet Open Table Tennis Championships here today.
Manav was in a spot of bother, thanks to team mate Manush Shah who beat him 3-1 (6-11, 11-4, 11-7, 12-10) in Group 1. That was sort of an upset in the group stage but both made it to the second stage despite the hiccups.
In the same section, group 4 too saw a tie, this time a three-way one among Snehit Suravajjulu, Anukram Jain and Ashwin Subramanian, all having similar scores of 3-0 against each other. In the end, both Snehit and Anukram edged out Ashwin on decimal points. They had all beaten the lone Bangladesh rival in the group, Aunt Hossain Joy, also by the same margin.
The other two groups had clear winners in Parth Virmani and South Africa's Adulaziz Alamri, who took the second spot in their group. In group 3, Shaurya Pednekar and Sarthak Seth made it to the second stage, which is the quarterfinals, in that order.
As for cadet girls, Archana Kamath Girish and Diya Chitale Parag qualified from group 1 to enter the quarterfinals. The other four groups saw Yashini Sivasankar, Srushti Haleangadi, Varuni Jaiswal, Priyanka Pareek, Surbhi Patwari, Selena Selvakumr, Prapti Sen and Kazakhstan's Zaresh Akasheva, the lone foreign entrant to enter the quarterfinals. With some of the cadet boys and cadet girls also taking part in the junior section, matches in both junior boys and junior Girls were some way behind schedule. Since the main draw matches are slated to begin tomorrow, all group matches will be completed tonight.
