West Bengal claim team titles in East Zone TT

Howrah, Oct 22 (IANS) West Bengal emerged champions in both the Men and Women categories in the team events of the UTT National Ranking (East Zone) Table Tennis Championships at the Howrah Indoor Stadium here on Tuesday.In the men and women finals, played in the best-of-five format, favourites West Bengal defeated North Bengal 3-1, just dropping one rubber in each section.

In fact, West Bengal began badly when their doubles pair of experienced Sougata Sarkar and Arjun Ghosh was caught on the wrong foot when they found both Jyabrata Bhattacharya and Mainak Das not only combined too well but also played some astonishing shots with excellent placing.Down 0-1, West Bengal had put up their best singles players in Ronit Bhanja and Arjun Ghosh with Sougata to follow. Ronit defeated Akaash Nath in straight games while Arjun Ghosh, despite dropping the opening game, stitched a nice win by taking the next three to put his side 2-1 ahead. Sougata, as usual, played it cool to wrap it up quickly and win the title for the hosts.In women team championships, the story was more or less the same, except the fact that West Bengal’s Krittwika Sinha Roy lost her singles rubber to Nikita Sarkar 2-3. But their doubles duo of Prapti Sen and Surbhi Patwari provided the hosts a grand opening and then Surbhi Patwari consolidated their position with Krittwika overcoming Puja Paul to lift the team trophy.With more teams participating in men team events, it started with the quarterfinals while in the women championships it was a simple case of teams competing from the semi-finals.Meanwhile, the men, women, Youth Boys and Girls qualification events began on Tuesday.–IANSdm/kk/bg

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