Moumita grabs girls title to complete West Bengal sweep

New Delhi: Moumita Dutta defeated A Naina 4-3 in a thrilling final to annex the sub-junior girls` crown, thus completing the sweep by West Bengal paddlers in the North Zone National Ranking Table Tennis championships here at the Hansraj Model School hall.

But the title triumph for the West Bengal girl came after some real haggle as Andhra Pradesh`s Naina, a bright paddler, kept herself always in the game giving several headaches during the final. In fact, Naina started by taking the first game but Moumita surged ahead with a 2-1 lead soon after. Naina`s push and prod in the two games saw Moumita gaining ascendancy and the Andhra girl arrested the problem immediately after to make it 2-2. But the see-saw battle witnessed leads changing hands even as Moumita kept a tight leash on her opponent. Naina had to really muster courage in the sixth game to stop her rival at 11-8 to take the issue to the decider. In the decider, both began cautiously but what made the difference in the ultimate analysis was that Moumita was back to her attacking best as Naina failed to counter the West Bengal girl`s scorching forehands. "She was too good. I made too many mistakes in the last game and it was really hard for me to come back," Naina said giving full credit to the winner. The group matches in the junior sections threw up 24 boys and 20 girls who have joined the top eight in the main draw. Though there was no surprise among the qualifiers but their real worthiness will be known only when they play tomorrow in the main draw, which is of 32 players each. Lalrin Puia and Abhishek Yadav have been seeded one and two in the junior boys` section while it will be Sagarika Mukherjee and Priyadarshani Das who have been accorded the pride of places as per their national ranking. The other seeds in the boys` category include Sabhay Virmani, Utkarsh Gupta, Birdie Boro, Manav Thakkar, Nishaad Shah and Ronit Bhanja. AnuskhaDutta, Ayhika Mukerjee, Yukte Roshni, Sreeja Aluka, Riti Shankar and Sumana Saha follow the girls` seeding in that order behind the top two seeds.