Kolkata: On the back of a stupendous performance at the Asian Table Tennis Championships, India’s top-ranked paddler Sathiyan Gnanasekaran believes the fear of playing superior Chinese and Korean players are no longer there among the country’s players, and qualifying for Tokyo Olympics is now a huge possibility.
“People have now started to believe that we can beat Chinese and Koreans. We have that belief as well. Now when we play them, we don’t have that fear anymore,” Sathiyan Gnanasekaran told IANS.
“We take them as any opponent and have the belief that on a given day we can beat them. So the mindset of all the players throughout the country has changed. We have set a huge benchmark of beating Koreans and playing close matches even with top Chinese players.
“People now believe that we can beat the best in the world. It’s not just me, but Sharath, Manika (Batra) and our juniors also are doing so well. The whole group is doing well,” he said.
India’s campaign in the Asian Table Tennis Championships came to an end when Sathiyan, the last man in fray, went down fighting to Chinese Lin Gaoyuan 1-3 in the quarter-finals at Yogyakarta last week.
Sathiyan, ranked 30 in the world, reached a big milestone in his career when he became the only second Indian to reach the men singles quarter-finals at the continental meet when he defeated An-Ji Song of North Korea. IANS