Saksham Choudhary produced a brilliant performance to defeat second seed Tushar Shahani 7-11, 11-8, 9-11, 12-10, 11-5 in an epic five game thriller in the semi-final of the Otters Club Vedanta Squash Open on Friday.
Saksham, who is playing his first tournament after a gap of six months due to injury,faced his biggest challenge in the second seed Tushar Shahani.
Tushar started attacking from the onset and took the first game 11-7.
Saksham bounced back, but faced a lot of resistance before winning the game 11-8 to make it 1-1.
Saksham fought hard in the third set, tiring Tushar by making him play longer rallies. But Tushar prevailed to take the third game 11-9.
With constant long rallies, Tushar was starting to lose steam and Saksham took the advantage to score back to back winners and race to an 8-0 lead. But Tushar pushed himself to the extreme and went on to score multiple winners to take the game to a 10-10 tie-breaker before Saksham managed to survive the scare, winning the game 12-10 with the match tied at 2-2.
Tushar, however, succumbed to a 5-11 defeat in the final game helping Saksham win the tie 7-11, 11-8, 9-11, 12-10, 11-5.
In another match, top seed Veer Chotrani survived the first game scare to beat Neel Joshi 8-11, 11-3, 11-8, 13-11 in a hard-fought semi-final match Results Boys U-19 Saksham Choudhary[3/4] bt Tushar Shahani [2] 7-11, 11-8, 9-11, 12-10, 11-5; Veer Chotrani [1] bt Neel Joshi 8-11, 11-3, 11-8, 13-11
Results Girls U19 Amira Singh [3/4] bt Bhavna Goyal [2] 11-4, 11-4, 11-7; Aishwarya Khubchandani [5/8] bt Mithali Surana 11-2, 11-3, 11-6.
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