The top seeds all went crashing out of the Tata Open India International Challenge on Friday in Mumbai as the tournament kept producing humdingers.
The top four seeds in the women’s singles draw were shown the door at the quarter-final stage, with junior national champion Ira Sharma carving out the most notable upset of many. Sharma, 17, lost the first game against former senior national champion Rituparna Das and was trailing 8-16 in the second before she launched a remarkable fightback.
The teenager from Haryana won seven straight points to haul herself back in the game before going on to take it 21-18. The decider was another tight affair but Sharma managed to keep her nose in front throughout, before eventually coming out an 18-21, 21-18, 21-19 winner in 48 minutes.
Asked how she managed to pull herself out of the hole, Sharma said, “It’s just about spirit. If you just tell yourself you want to do it, somehow, it just happens. It’s your belief – that you can change the direction of the match at any point.”
However, Das had just recovered from a hip injury and was playing in her first tournament since the world championships in August, so her fitness was suspect. Das’s coach from the P Gopichand academy, Amrish Shinde, confirmed that she had still not recovered fully.
“She had been carrying the hip injury for a year before the doctor told her to take rest for at least a couple of months in August,” said Shinde. “This was her first tournament since August but looks like she will need more rest.”
Sharma, meanwhile, hasn’t had a particularly impressive year herself since winning the junior national title last December. She failed to get past the quarter-finals of any international tournament – junior or senior – that she took part in, and neither did she do well in ranking tournaments at home.
At the senior Nationals in November, she lost to 16-year-old M Tanishq in the third round after another three-game epic. Sharma admitted that the pressure of carrying the tag of junior national champion had been bogging her down. But not anymore.
“Today, I was in the right mental space,” she said. “It was a higher-ranked opponent so I wasn’t thinking of winning. I just wanted to fight and give my best.” And it worked.
In the semi-finals, Sharma will be up against 19-year-old Riya Mukherjee, who beat the fourth seed Yin Fun Lim from Malaysia 21-19, 21-19. Former national champion Ruthvika Shivani Gadde had to sweat it out for 45 minutes before beating second seed Sri Krishna Priya Kudaravalli 17-21, 21-10, 21-17. Gadde will take on Malaysia’s Thinaah M in the semis.
Lakshya Sen, one of the favourites to win the title after the upset of top seed Sourabh Verma in the pre-quarters, sailed through to the semis with a straight-game win over his fellow trainee at the Prakash Padukone academy, Siddharth Pratap Singh.
Sen, 16, will take on second seed Abhishek Yelegar for a spot in the final. Yelegar beat Malaysia’s Teck Zhi Soo 21-13, 24-22 in another highly watchable match. Mithun Manjunath, 19, beat the second-ranked Indian senior Pratul Joshi 23-21, 21-23, 21-15 after an hour and five minutes. He will take on Thailand’s Sitthikom Thammasin in the semis.
The top seeds in men’s doubles – Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty – and women’s doubles – Meghana Jakkampudi and Poorvisha S Ram – were both beaten in three games. Mixed doubles second seeds Prajakta Sawant and Yogendran Krishnan also lost after playing a decider.
Corrections and clarifications: This story has been updated to reflect that Rituparna Das has just recovered from a hip injury, along with quotes from her coach.
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