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The first gold medals of the National Games 2022 were won by the West Bengal women's table tennis team followed by the Gujarat men's table tennis team on Wednesday (September 21) in Surat.
Experienced Ayhika Mukherjee, Mouma Das and Sutirtha Mukherjee helped West Bengal beat Maharashtra 3-1 in the final. Manav Thakkar, Harmeet Desai and Manush Shah brought out their best games to defeat Delhi 3-0 in the summit clash.
Maharashtra and West Bengal won the men’s bronze medals after their semi-final loss, while Tamil Nadu and Telangana won bronze medals in the women’s category.
Swastika Ghosh started the proceedings while Diya Chitale played the third singles. The two youngsters, however, could not deal with Ayhika Mukherjee’s playing style and lost tamely.
Read: National Games 2022: Full schedule, list of sports, venues and dates
Reeth Rishya Tennison leveled the scores for Maharashtra, beating Sutirtha in straight games.
Diya Chitale and Mouma Das played a humdinger of a match. The Maharashtra youngster started strong by winning the opening set 11-6 but it was the 38-year-old Das who frustrated Diya by making her work hard for every point.
Diya did well to return from 4-8 in the fourth game and earned two match points but failed to convert them. Mouma took advantage of the youngster’s inexperience and drove home the advantage to win the decider.
Swastika then put up a far better showing in the reverse fixture against Sutirtha, taking the Tokyo Olympian to five sets. However, the experienced Bengal paddler kept her nerves in the decider to take a sizeable lead and win the match on the second match point.
Speaking to journalists after the match, Sutirtha said Ayhika's easy win to start with and Mouma Das' experience proved to be a game changer. She said:
“There was not much to choose between both the teams. But Ayhika’s easy win in the first match and Mouma didi winning the third match the way she did gave me the confident in the fourth,” Sutirtha said.
National Games 2022: Gujarat paddlers have it easy in final
Gujarat, the top seed in the men’s tournament, were in roaring form since the start of the competition. Before the final, the only question was whether Delhi could at least put up a fight.
The home team’s domination was so absolute that they did not drop a single match throughout the competition as they surged to open’s Gujarat’s account on the National Games 2022 medal table.
Going into the final, the only change they made was when Manav Thakkar took captain Harmeet Desai’s place in the first singles match. Thakkar dominated Sudhanshu Grover in the opening set. Though the Delhi paddler put up a fight in the next two sets, he could not find a way past the former junior World No. 1 and went down in straight sets 11-3, 13-11, 14-12.
Delhi would have hoped that Payas Jain could repeat his semi-final heroics but Harmeet Desai proved too strong for him. The Delhi lad managed to save four match points and threatened to make a comeback but the Gujarat skipper was in no mood to relent and clinched the first two extended points to give his team a 2-0 lead.
Manush Shah then defeated Yashansh Malik to wrap up the final and help the silver medallists from the last edition to rise higher on the podium on home turf.
