look news india
The Indian men's and women's teams reached the knockout stage of the World Table Tennis Team Championships with contrasting wins. The Indian women's team performed brilliantly after falling behind for a while and achieved a thrilling 3-2 victory over Spain. The men's team defeated New Zealand 3-0 without any problems. In the women's section, after Srija Akula and Manika Batra lost both their opening matches, Ayhika Mukherjee brought India back into the match with a win. Sreeja lost to Maria Jiao 9-11, 11-9, 11-13, 4-11 and Manika Sophia lost to Juan Zhang 13-11, 6-11, 8-11, 11-9, 11-7 . At this time Spain took a 2-0 lead. In the third singles match, Ayhika defeated Elvira Red 11-8, 11-13, 11-8, 11-4 and made the score 2-1. Manika defeated Maria 11-9, 11-2, 11-4 in the fourth singles to level the score at 2-2. Sreeja defeated Zhang Som 11-6, 11-13, 11-6, 11-3 in the decider to give India a 3-2 win. In Group-1, India finished second with three wins in four matches.
In the men's category, defending national champions Harmeet Desai and G Sathiyan had easy wins over Choi Timothy and Alfred Pena Dela respectively in the first two singles. Harmeet defeated Delan 11-5, 11-1, 11-6 and Sathiyan 11-3, 11-7, 11-6. Manush Shah made a comeback after two games down to defeat Maxwell Henderson 10-12, 6-11, 11-4, 11-8, 11-6. In Group-3, India was at third place after South Korea and Poland. India is among the 32 teams out of 40 that have qualified for the knockouts in both categories.