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Some controversy,
Paddler Soumyajit Ghosh, who is facing allegations of rape by an ex-girlfriend, is set to be dropped from the Commonwealth Games squad.

Facing rape charge, paddler Soumyajit Ghosh set to be dropped from CWG squad

This time both our men and women teams are playing in the top championship division which is taking place in Halmstad, Sweden right now.

Our mens team is putting up a good show. They are in group D. Won their matches against 3-2 against Poland and 3-2 against Croatia. Lost the matches 0-3 against South Korea and 2-3 against France. In the 6 team groups, top team will move to the QF and the next 2 ranked teams will go to the pre quarter finals. On our group, Korea is the clear top team with 4 wins out of 3 but 4 other teams - India,Croatia, Austria and France are all tied with 2 wins out of 4. We have an all important match today against Austria where a win will take to the last 16.

Achanta Sharath Kamal has been the star for our with 4 out of 4 wins. He was rested for the match against Korea.

Womens team has done badly though losing all 5 matches in their group. Expected more from Mankia Batra but she lost all her matches. It seems she spent all her energy at commonwealth game.

Good to see our men in contention for the last-16 stage with one match to play (against Austria).

I remember when Calcutta hosted the world TT championship in 1975 (Istvan Jonyer beat Stepancic in the men's singles final, and Dragutin Surbek was a big crowd favourite), India was still among the world's top 16 (and finished 14th that year IIRC). The top division has now grown to 24 teams from 16, so India are back in the top division (which itself is nice to see). It looks as if our men are ranked 13 and women 16, so the women seem to have under-performed while the men need to win against Austria to live up to their ranking.

Top story in the world championship website (an unfortunate one):

https://www.ittf.com/2018/05/02/nature- ... -halmstad/

An interesting factoid that most people know (presumably): one of the first winners of the world TT singles title was Fred Perry (in 1929, aged 20). Perry only began playing tennis at 14 -- table tennis being his first love -- and began to focus more on tennis only once he was 21.

PKBasu wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 7:58 am Good to see our men in contention for the last-16 stage with one match to play (against Austria).

It looks as if our men are ranked 13 and women 16, so the women seem to have under-performed while the men need to win against Austria to live up to their ranking.

I am surprised at those rankings. If you see previous pages of this thread, both our men and women were outside top 24 in the last world championships and got promoted as they won the second division and finished 25th last time. So, they should be ranked somewhere in the lower rung of top 24.

I just surmised that based on the order in which the teams were listed on the world championship website. Our men's team is listed as the 13th one (which does seem a rather high ranking), while China is the first one listed on the men's and women's lists.

Men are actually tied 10th in team rankings (tied with austria and Brazil). And women are ranked #14 in team rankings.

Sadly, our mens team lost 2-3 against Austria to be out of contention of last 16 stage. For once, Achantha Shararth Kamal lost the deciding match. It seems we were pretty close to all the teams in the group barring Korea. We had 3-2 wins against Poland and Croatia and lost 2-3 against France and Austria. All were close matches and could have gone either way.

48th ranked Achantha Sharath Kamal has been serving us well for year but he is 36 now. So, apart from 46th ranked Sathiyan Ganashekhran we need some young blood in mens table tennis.

Soumyajit Ghosh was ranked above Achanta Sharat Kamal for the past 2-3 years. Soumyajit (who is 24) unfortunately faces a very serious charge of rape by a former girl-friend. (While I have no idea about the specifics of this case, the possibility of extortion cannot be ruled out in such matters in small-town India, and a national-level sportsman could often be a target). Given the stringent national policy against rape, Ghosh has had to sit out the CWG and the world championship, but if he is able to demonstrate his innocence, we do have a pretty decent successor to the veteran.
(Siliguri, a town of 700 people in 1905, has grown to 1.5 million or more now; a totally unplanned "city", but it is a cradle of table-tennis talent!).

sameerph wrote: ↑Thu May 03, 2018 6:19 am Sadly, our mens team lost 2-3 against Austria to be out of contention of last 16 stage.

Just realised at last 16 stage there were only 12 teams ( as top 4 seeds got first round byes).

We did really well in classification matches for 13-24 places. In the first match, we beat Singapore 3-0 , then avenged our earlier loss to France and beat them 3-2 and in the final match beat Romania 3-1 to finish 13th overall.

13th overall is perhaps our best effort in a while but not much for Asian games as 5 Asian teams finished ahead of us - China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hongkong.

PKBasu wrote: ↑Thu May 03, 2018 11:02 am Soumyajit Ghosh was ranked above Achanta Sharat Kamal for the past 2-3 years. Soumyajit (who is 24) unfortunately faces a very serious charge of rape by a former girl-friend. (While I have no idea about the specifics of this case, the possibility of extortion cannot be ruled out in such matters in small-town India, and a national-level sportsman could often be a target). Given the stribot ngent national policy against rape, Ghosh has had to sit out the CWG and the world championship, but if he is able to demonstrate his innocence, we do have a pretty decent successor to the veteran.

This is some part of this story -

Soumyajit Ghosh: A premature end to a promising career

Really looks like the similar story like that of Sardara Singh. I really hope it is not the end of the career for him.

If this story is true (the woman, who was his fiancee, extorting money from him, for which Soumyajit has proof), then it is simply ludicrous that his career has been suspended for so many months. Utter insanity in fact!

India #2 Sathiyan Gnanasekaran had an excellent week in Austria. In ITTF world tour Austrian open. Sathiyan qualified for the main draw. In the qualifying after a first round bye, Sathiyan beat Chinese youth olympic games champion Wang Chuqin in Q2 4-1 than a Slovakian 4-0 in Q3 and then beat world #17 and Asian championships silver medalists Korean Jeong Sanguen 4-2 in the final qualifying round.

Then, in the main draw first round, Sathiyan had the biggest win of his career beating world #16 Marcos Freitas of Portugal 4-11, 11-9, 11-9, 8-11, 6-11, 11-9, 11-7 but lost in second round to world #2 Chinese Xu Xin in 5 games.

All other Indians lost in qualifying rounds.

Sathiyan was ranked at a career high #35 in the ITTF world rankings last week behind Achantha Sharth Kamal's ranking of 31. Sathiyan should gain a few places after this week's performance.

In womens rankings, Manika Batra is ranked at a career high of #53.

Indian table tennis continues to look up after the success at CWG and Asian games.

Our veteran player Sharath Kamal has first-time broken into the top-30 of the ITTF rankings and G. Sathiyan has also achieved career-best ranking ... In the women's ranking also, Manika Batra rises to her career-best ranking and nearing to the top-50 of the ITTF rankings.

At The ITTF Rankings - December 2018,

The Men's Rankings
#30 Sharath Kamal Achanta (IND)
#31 Sathiyan Gnanasekaran (IND)
#100 Harmeet Desai (IND)

The Women's Rankings
#52 Manika Batra (IND)