Table tennis is in a unique place in India. It has the usual markers of progress: recent success via the Commonwealth and Asian Games, popular athletes as ambassadors in Manika Batra and Achanta Sharath Kamal and a direct mass connect as a participatory sport. Yet it's still a developing sport, with success measured by bronze medals and upset wins over higher ranked players, mainly at quadrennial and multi-sport events.
What it's lacked has been a regular presence in both the Indian sports calendar and the mindspace of the sports fan, where spectators tune in regularly and players are in with a chance at the highest level.
Ultimate Table Tennis, a franchise league which began in 2017 and resumed this year after a four-year break, is one step to bridge this gap. By bringing together players and top-level coaches and support staff for an extended period, the league could go even further and change the sport in India - and, in turn, directly benefit as the sport improves and gains in importance.
It's already happening. G Sathiyan, now one of India's top players, cites himself as the proof of UTT's impact. "In 2017 I was somewhere around 120-130 in the world and coming in as a youngster. In UTT I was unbeaten, started beating top-10 top-20 players and that gave me such confidence. I was top 50 the next year in the international scene."
By that yardstick, this year's tournament bodes well for the busy season ahead with the Asian Championships, the Asian Games and the 2024 Olympic qualification cycle. Goa Challengers - a team not featuring the usual big Indian names - won the tournament, beating defending champions Chennai Lions, led by 41-year-old Sharath, in the final.
There were several signs of the sport's growth - Harmeet Desai, the current India No. 1, ended the winning streak of German world No. 33 Benedikt Duda in the high-pressure final. Earlier, 22-year-old Manush Shah stunned world No. 17 Aruna Quadri of U Mumba in a must-win match while 23-year-old Archana Kamath had upset world No. 39 Suthasini Sawettabut.
Reliving the winning moment����
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The year 2018 appears to be the tipping point for Indian table tennis, with breakthrough medals at the Commonwealth Games (8) and the historic first Asian Games medals (bronze in men's team and mixed doubles.) But Sharath points out that this process started much before. "The 2016 Rio Olympics was first time that four Indians had qualified in singles. That was the beginning of the graph."
"In 2017 you had Sathiyan and Manika doing well at the international level, 2018 CWG we had 8 medals, something we've never had before and never after. Then at the Asian Games where we have 2 bronze medals for the first time in 60 years, so it just kept getting better."
The UTT slotted in at the right time in the graph. Its first three seasons coincided with international success and the fourth comes right before the Asian Games. And it now provides a prime platform for knowledge transfer and skills upgrade. Harmeet says there is much to learn from foreign coaches and players in even small things. "How to prepare before and approach the game, how much body should be used, how to take the ball early, the diet... These kind of small things also make a difference."
The talk about foreign coach is striking because India has been without an overseas head coach since Massimo Constantini in 2018 - a long gap for a top sport.
For Ayhika Mukherjee, who partnered Sutirtha Mukherjee to win the WTT Contender (akin to an lower-tier ATP/WTA title in tennis or a BWF World Tour 100/300 event in badminton) in Tunis in June, the league is also an opportunity to hone her skills by trying out new things.
"I discovered that I can attack even better... actually my game is defensive in style, I try to block and my rubber is different, it's anti-type so I like to trick and play. And now combining attack with it is making my game open up. A lot of people have told me that my game will go to another level once I attack more, I got to try it here and it worked out well so I got confident," she says.
One of her wins was an upset over world No. 26 Lily Zhang, a significant one for a player ranked 135th in the world.
Sreeja Akula, two-time national champion and the breakout player from India's table tennis campaign at CWG last year, made her UTT debut this year. "The most important thing I've learnt is to handle the pressure of everyone watching, the whole team is behind us here and we have so many people watching."
Manush, who had one of the headline wins of this season against Quadri, shared an interesting anecdote about how he won.
The coach had him do a specific training drill one hour before the match. This involved a high-intensity form of multi-ball training common in the sport, but required the coach to be very quick and powerful physically.
Since Quadri hds one of the most powerful forehands in the world, they did this to attune Manush and it worked like a charm. In the more popular sports in India, these smaller aspects are seldom seen as separate from the regular training for sport. But this kind of experience and exposure is still new for table tennis.
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There is still a long way to go, and not just on field. Administratively, the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI) has had its own shares of troubles, with a court-appointed Committee of Administrators having taken over last year after Manika Batra took them to court over fixing allegations.
Selection controversies have dragged them to court ahead of the CWG last year and the criteria is still open to questions. The absence of a regular foreign coach and high-performance director is jarring for an Indian sport with Olympic ambitions. Amidst it all, it's the players who are doing their best and a league like the UTT reinforces their work and suggests that there is commercial interest in the sport - something crucial to Indian sport.
UTT is promoted by Niraj Bajaj and Vita Dani, who also support the TTFI. There are many moving parts that need to fall into place for a league to run successfully in India but the bottom-line is investment and visibility.
"It is important to involve corporates in any sport because they are the ones who bring in the revenue. The moment there is revenue, not profit I am saying revenue, is the time when there will be more interest. This year we have had maximum number of support is terms of sponsorship and partnership and this is what sport needs," Dani says.
Sponsorship aside, the involvement of corporates also means marketing and advertising the league, thereby the sport. Duda - who comes from Germany, home of table tennis' foremost league Bundesliga - says the leagues back home are not as popular as UTT.
"People here know about UTT, they see it on TV, it's everywhere on broadcast so it helps to develop the sport. We are not as present in Germany." Of course, those leagues stick to the traditional format of the game, has no mix of genders and are more weekend leagues than franchise teams. But UTT is more fast-paced, with a spectator-friendly format where each game counts.
Sathiyan sees this format as an advantage. "The intensity here is so much that every game is under pressure so you get into the zone quickly and you stay there. It makes you match ready and that really helps, I think this helped that in 2018 at the CWG and Asian Games and it will help us now too, I think."
As he says, the hope is that having UTT a month before the double whammy of Asian Championship and Asian Games will benefit Indian players. With two medals to defend at the Asiad, there is already more expectation on the players that before. Whether or not the UTT experience plays a role here, it definitely has one to play in the longer run.