National Games 2022: Paddlers Harmeet Desai and Sutirtha Mukherjee have multiple Gold medals in the ongoing National Games 2022 as Gujarat and West Bengal dominate the table tennis event. Gujarat has won Gold medals in three events while West Bengal takes home the yellow metal in four events. Gujarat's Harmeet Desai won two Gold medals in the tournament while the pair of Manush Shah and Krittwika Sinha Roy bagged Gold in the mixed event. For West Bengal, Sutirtha won three Gold medals in different categories. She won the Gold in women's singles, women's doubles and women's team events.
Sutirtha got the better of Telangana's Sreeja Akula by 4-1 in the singles event. She also won the final of the Women's doubles event, pairing with Aykiha Mukherjee. Harmeet won the Gold in the singles event after beating Soumyajit while he had earlier won Gold in Gujarat men's team.
In the semifinals, Harmeet defeated World No.37 G Sathiyan while Sutirtha defeated Manika Batra in the last four clashes. Harmeet rode on the vociferous support of the home crowd to start the semi-final clash against World No. 37 Sathiyan by taking an 8-0 lead in the opening set and never looked back thereafter. By the time Sathiyan found his footing, the local hero was up two sets to nil. The top seed did manage to catch up with the last edition silver medallist by winning the next two sets but that hardly created a dent in Harmeet's confidence.
The 29-year-old from Surat tightened his defence, stuck to his game plan and closed out the semifinal on the third match point in the sixth set to stay on course for his second gold medal from these Games. He had led Gujarat to the men’s team gold earlier this week.
In the women's singles semifinal, Sutirtha was equally dominating against Manika in the first match of the day. She countered Manika's backhand threat by effectively slowing down the rallies to take the first two sets. Manika threatened to make a comeback after she saved a set point before winning the third. The two players shared the next two sets but Sutirtha took control of the sixth by opening up a 5-1 lead then wrapped up the semifinal on the first match point.
