Services' pugilists stamped their authority in the first round while the fancied women marched ahead on the second day of the Junior National Boxing Championships here on Thursday.
SSBC's Vishwamitra, the silver medal winner at the Nations Cup held in Serbia, won his opening bout against Madan Pratap Anakapalli from Andhra with a 5:0 verdict to register his presence in 48 kg, while A Naoba Singh, teammate of Vishwamitra, a bronze medallist at the same event in Serbia, defeated Aditya Gaut from Maharashtra 3:2 in what was the best bout of the morning in the 52 kg weight class.
In middleweight (75 kg), Lakhmani from SSCB, a silver medal winner at the Nation's Cup earlier this year, won his first bout against Abhimanyu Singh of Rajasthan when the referee stopped the contest in the second round.
As for the women's bouts, there were as many as nine RSC verdicts with half a dozen clear decisions on points telling the story of one-sided contests among the 32 bouts in categories between 48 kg and +80 kg.
With no clear domination by any particular state during the preliminary rounds, the most fancied boxers went through the motions in order to make it to the next round with a few walkovers.
Though the day began with a 4:1 decision in favour of Haryana's Jayshree over Kajal of Chandigarh in 48 kg, there were a few split decision (3:2) going in favour of Kerala's Nikhitha M Baby over her Rajasthan rival Chanchal Shekawat (48), Pumpi Gyadi of Arunachal, who accounted for Tamil Nadu's S Sabitha, Srijan Sharma of Himachal Pradesh winning over Jharkhand's Nisha Kumari and Maharashtra's Sakshi Jagdal repeating the decision against her Goan opponent Shrisha Jampulla in different weight classes.
Against expectations, Goa's Tanisha Chawan got a RSC-I decision against Sunita Gouda of Odisha (48 kg), Andhra's Nikhitha Devi Baddini getting a similar verdict against Chandigarh's Nandini (53), Maharashtra's Heeral Makwana forcing the same decision against Telangana's S Akshaya (70) and finally, Haryana's Manpreet Kaur forcing N Binapani Patro of Odisha in the first round with the RSC verdict.
UP's Anchal Singh got a 4:1 verdict against Himachal's Sujata Kumari after the latter managed to trade off some blows to her better opponent while Odisha's Puja Nayak made amends for her teammates' first-round losses by getting 4:1 decision in her favour in 70 kg against Manu Baggar of Uttar Pradesh.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
