Manika Batra moved to the next round after winning a 56-minute battle-- seven sets against 20th seed Margaryta Pesotkova.
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Indian padder, Manika Batra has moved to the third round of Table Tennis at the Tokyo Olympics. The 26-year-old defeated Margaryta Pesotkova of Ukraine. The match started with a bit of a disappointment as the padder was struggling against her opponent.
Manika Batra moved to the next round after winning a 56-minute battle– seven sets against 20th seed Margaryta Pesotkova. She will be aiming for a medal at Tokyo Games. She lost the opening game but came from behind to lead 3-2 before the match entered the decider and she clinched the match 4-3.
Pesotska displayed her class in the following Game, and she won it 11-4, and she needed just two more wins to progress to the next round.
Batra staged a comeback in Games 3 and 4, bringing the match into an exciting position. It was perhaps the one-minute break that Batra took. She composed herself and got her head back into the game. The match went back and forth, and as a result, the match was even at 3-3 and it went into the decider.
In what can just be described as a nailbiter, Indian padder, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran lost to Lam Siu Hang at Tokyo Olympics. The match took an unprecedented turn after the fourth round when Hang started to make a comeback. He was initially 3-1 sets down. The man from Hong Kong gave swift replies to India’s attempts at scoring points. Lam Siu Hang came from behind to win the fixture and book his place in the next round.
At the end of 7 sets, Hang won 4-3 and will proceed further in the Round of 32.
Sathiyan Gnanasekaran held a 2-0 head-to-head lead over his 24-year-old at the beginning of the match. However, there was a definite shift of dynamics in the game. Siu Hang made it 2-1. Gnanasekaran won the next round. However, with this win, Lam Siu Hang has progressed to the 3rd round of the Men’s Singles event, for the first time.
The match started off with a fast-paced rally by both the players. To put things into perspective, both the players were winning points one after the other and were not too far away from each other. This was until of course Hanf took a passive lead in the 5th round, and made it tough for Eventually, Lam Siu Hang took the first game, 11-7; only the 2nd time between them that the Indian has dropped a game in their previous two meets.
