Chennai, a city steeped in rich culture and heritage along the sultry southern coast of India, loves cinema.
Here, movies form a world unto themselves, encompassing the very heart and soul of the denizens. Megastars attain the stature of demigods, with their life-sized flex vinyl posters showered with milk during weekend releases and their larger-than-life personas religiously worshipped.
And Achanta Sharath Kamal vs Sathiyan Gnanasekaran is a blockbuster on any given day.
There will hardly be anyone who wouldn’t love to get a glimpse of these two soft-spoken boys next door, who have made the country proud on numerous occasions at a myriad of national and international tournaments.
Chennai doesn’t disappoint – on and off the table
The Ultimate Table Tennis brought them together on Sunday, albeit each of them turning up on opposite sides of the table. That didn’t matter to the ‘knowledgeable Chennai crowd’, an overwhelming number wearing the number seven of Chennai Super Kings’ Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who thronged the gates of the Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium.
When the duo went up against each other in mixed doubles— Sharath wearing Chennai Lions’ yellow and Sathiyan in Dabang Delhi TTC’s blue corner— the fans cheered for every point with equal passion.
READ MORE | UTT 2024: Local boy Sharath Kamal draws fans to stadium as Chennai Lions ride on home support to find win
In the mixed doubles fixture of the first tie, which the Lions won 8-7, Sharath and his partner Sakura Mori of Japan prevailed 2-1, despite the opponent team having the advantage of pairing up a right-hander and a southpaw in Thailand’s Orawan Paranang.
Sharath, who didn’t have the best of starts in the league, having lost all six games he played in the opener, finally had a reason to smile as he flung a few Chennai jerseys to the spectators in the general stands. He won his singles fixture 2-1 as well, thrashing Austrian Andreas Levenko 11-5, 11-8, 8-11.
With the Lions winning its first three matches by identical scorelines, one could say the writing was already on the wall by the time the 63rd-ranked Sathiyan sauntered to the middle to face Jules Rolland.
The Cho show
Meanwhile, Jaipur Patriots registered its first win of the season with a 9-6 battering of U Mumba.
Cho Seungmin, ranked 146 in the world, continued to trouble his opponents with a booming forehand and an equally lethal backhand drive. He made World No. 20 Quadri Aruna look like a lost child scampering across the table, as he silenced him with a scoreline of 11-9, 11-8, 11-5.
The match between the skippers Manav and Snehit SFR turned out to be a humdinger. Manav had his back to the wall in the first game as Snehit’s aggressive returns became a tad much for the Gujarati paddler to deal with.
The second game began in similar fashion, Manav trailing 6-2 against his lesser-known opponent. But he soon turned his weakness into strength, calmly blocking Snehit’s shots and looking to calmly slot the ball near the half-long region.
Manav went on to win nine of the next 10 rallies to pull level. The last game was a neck-and-neck affair, but Manav got to have the last laugh even though the scores were tied 8-all at one point.
The last fixture had to be the match of the day. With the score at 7-5 in favour of the Patriots, Sutirtha Mukherjee had to bag all her games against Nithyashree in the last fixture but that wasn’t to be. The local lady, Sreeja Akula’s replacement in the Patriots dugout, showed she isn’t here to just fill the numbers.
After beating Yashaswini Ghorpade in the first game, she took things up a notch to hand a 2-1 defeat to Sutirtha, who alongside Ayhika Mukherjee, had stunned China’s Chen Meng and Wang Yidi in the women’s doubles quarterfinal to ensure a historic medal for India at the Hangzhou Asian Games.
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