UTT 2024: Paranang downs Szocs as Dabang Delhi sets up final against Goa Challengers

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Dabang Delhi TTC’s Supergirl Orawan Paranang taking flight and raining down a forehand winner!

The Thai paddler eventually went on to inflict a clean sweep, her first this season, upon the best-ranked player of Ultimate Table Tennis 2024 to help her side win a scintillating semifinal against Ahmedabad SG Pipers 8-6 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium in Chennai. Dabang will now meet the defending champion Athlead Goa Challengers in the grand finale on Saturday.

In the women’s singles match, Paranang suffocated the SG Pipers skipper Bernadette Szocs, ranked 26 slots above her in the world rankings. In a classic case of ‘horses for courses’, the Dabang management saw through Szocs’ gameplay and decided Paranang was best placed to take the Romanian down.

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These were two players, who rely heavily on their forehands. But Paranang, despite the mixed bag of a season that she had been having, had the slightest of edges over Szocs, when it came to forehand winners – getting 47 per cent success compared to the World No. 13’s 46.

And on Friday, Paranang ran away with the medium rallies (5-8 shots), winning 11 of the 15 exchanges. She even pulled out the difficult strawberry flick, an effective method to deal with net shots that have ample underspin on them, to pocket the tie in style.

Home support for Sathiyan

Chennai doesn’t disappoint. At least when it comes to supporting one of its own. However, with Chennai Lions being ushered to the exit door before the tournament could enter the business stage, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, an out-an-out Chennai lad, became the cynosure of all eyes.

It didn’t matter to them that Sathiyan has played for Dabang all his life. The influx was such that extra seats had to be added to the VIP stand to accommodate guests.

Earlier, Sathiyan chose to serve from the left at the toss, a custom most teams have followed at the tournament to have the service advantage lest the game trickles down to the decider via a golden point. And Lilian Bardet decided to test the Dabang skipper from the get go itself, dishing out a plethora of shots with heavy underspin. It did seem to work, with Sathiyan failing to read the pace on the returns.

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The vehement cheering from the stands seemed to have woken Sathiyan up in the second game, when he started to employ the forehand early during a rally. And he did it while continuing to stick closer to the table and serving lower towards the net. He showed acute game awareness on a couple of occasions as well when he sent Bardet the other way.

However, Sathiyan was made to wait further for what would have been his first-ever win against Bardet, across all tournaments. For the 31-year-old could only bag five points in the last game before Bardet unleashed the ‘T-Rex’ celebration, where the Frenchman prances about like a dinosaur, after mauling his opponent with a forehand topspin that sped off the table like a bullet.

Manush-Szocs remain unblemished

With both teams having a left-right-handed combination, they were on an even keel going into the mixed doubles. But Manush and Szocs, having stayed unbeaten in the league stage, had the advantage.

The probing question, however, was whether Szocs would be able to recover from the thrashing she had just been handed. But almost magically, Szocs’ tomahawks which even resulted in service errors during the singles fixture, returned to its former glory as the duo won 3-0.

Manush and Szocs’ hard work came undone when Dabang’s Andreas Levenko took the first game from Manush to ensure the tie trickles down to the fifth fixture between Diya Chitale and Reeth Rishya. And almost on cue, Chitale vacated her seat in the dugout to limber up. As the 21-year-old watched on while doing some stretches, Austria’s Levenko claimed his first win this season to make her job a bit easier.

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Perhaps, Sachin Shetty, coach of Dabang, was the most confused at the venue regarding whom to back in the last fixture. To be sure, Chitale is his ward, but Reeth is Sachin’s sister-in-law.

Chitale, who had dropped only one game in the last four matches, kept playing to the short-statured Reeth’s wide forehand to bag easy points. With a comprehensive win in the first two games, she made sure Dabang enters its third UTT final with a chance to become the first team to win the title twice.