De Haan : Indian stars Achanta Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan Gnanasekaran cornered a bronze medal in the men’s doubles category of the 2017 Challenge Belgium Open table tennis tournament here.
The Indians lost in the semi-finals to the second-seeded German duo of Patrick Franziska and Ricardo Walther 7-11, 11-7, 11-5, 5-11, 5-11 to settle for a bronze on Friday night.
Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan lost the first game but came back strongly, to win the next two. They, however, couldn’t maintain the momentum and lost the next two games to miss a golden opportunity to make the final.
Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan showed their class on their way to the semis, first beating the Belgian team of Thibaut Darcis and Lauric Jean 11-7, 11-6, 11-7. They then defeated Sweden’s Harald Andersson and Simon Arvidsson 11-8, 11-8, 11-6.
India’s Sanil Shetty too had a good run in the tournament, beating higher ranked players and going all the way to the quarter-finals.
He beat seventh seed Cedric Nuytinck of Belgium 11-8, 7-11, 12-10, 11-5, 2-11, 5-11, 11-9 and ninth seed Cheng-Ting Liao of Taiwan 8-11, 11-9, 12-10, 11-7, 11-7. Both Cedric and Cheng-Ting are much higher-ranked players than Shetty, World No.70 and World No.72 respectively to his own 180.
He couldn’t, however, unravel Germany’s Ricardo Walther and missed out on a medal after going down 7-11, 3-11, 11-5, 7-11, 6-11.
The Indian women’s doubles pair of Manika Batra and Mouma Das too did well to make the quarters.
They overcame the Taiwan pair of Yu-Wen Huang and Yu-Jhun Li 11-5, 9-11, 11-9, 10-12, 11-4. But they later went down to another Taiwan pair Hsien-Tzu Cheng and Hsing-Yin Liu 6-11, 11-5, 9-11, 10-12 in a closely fought encounter.
IANS