The Ultimate Table Tennis 2023, featuring some of the biggest names in the sport internationally, will be starting in Pune’s Balewadi Sports Complex on Thursday.
It makes a return after four years. The previous edition of the tournament was played in 2019, following which it was cancelled numerous times due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The competition was founded in 2017, as per Olympics.com. The tournament will feature four six teams, Bengaluru Smashers, Chennai Lions, Dabang Delhi TTC, Goa Challengers, Puneri Paltan Table Tennis and U Mumba TT competing for the trophy. Each team will have six players, four Indian and two foreign players.
Chennai Lions are headed by Commonwealth Games champion Sharath Kamal and are defending champions. Puneri Paltans have world number 22 Omar Assar of Egypt.
Bengaluru Smashes feature the number one women’s singles player from India, Manika Batra. U Mumba is spearheaded by Aruna Quadri of Nigeria, who is world number 18.
Dabang Delhi are the 2018 Champions having top-ranked players like Sathiyan Gnanasekaran and national champion Sreeja Akula in their side. Asian Games and CWG medalist Anthony Amalraj, is also there in the team.
The UTT Season 4 will be a single-legged round-robin league format tournament. The final is set to be played on July 30.
Ultimate Table Tennis 2023 teams and squads
-Bengaluru Smashers: Manika Batra, Sanil Shetty, Poymantee Baisya, Ankur Bhattacharjee, Kirill Gerassimenko (Kazakhstan) and Natalia Bajor (Poland)
-Chennai Lions: Sharath Kamal, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Payas Jain, Prapti Sen, Yangzi Liu (Australia) and Benedikt Duda (Germany)
-Dabang Delhi TTC: Sathiyan G, Sreeja Akula, Ayhika Mukherjee, Anirban Ghosh, Jon Persson (Sweden) and Barbora Balazova (Slovakia)
-Goa Challengers: Harmeet Desai, T Reeth Rishya, Kwittwika Sinha Roy, Anthony Amalraj, Suthasini Sawettabut (Thailand) and Alvaro Robles (Spain)
-Puneri Paltan Table Tennis: Manush Shah, Archana Kamath, Snehit SFR, Anusha Kutumbale, Omar Assar (Egypt) and Hana Matelova (Czech Republic)
-U Mumba TT: Manav Thakkar, Diya Chitale, Mouma Das, Sudhanshu Grover, Lily Zhang (USA) and Aruna Quadri (Nigeria). (ANI)
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