TT: India turns focus to doubles ahead of LA 2028

Hindustan Times

11-05-2025

Mumbai: The senior World Championships in Doha starting on May 17 and the Asian Youth Championships (June 26-July 2) in Tashkent will provide the Indian table tennis team's head coach Massimo Costantini a chance to take stock of and draw a roadmap in an area where Indians have had greater success at global level: doubles.
The plan assumes greater significance given that all three doubles events will return to the TT programme at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. It is in those events that Indians have made bigger moves more frequently in top level WTT and multi-sport tournaments in the recent past.
A few days ago, Manush Shah and Diya Chitale captured the mixed doubles title at the WTT Contender Tunis, beating the higher-ranked Miwa Harimoto and Sora Matsushima of Japan in the final. A couple of years ago, Ayhika Mukherjee and Sutirtha Mukherjee delivered India's first women's doubles medal at the Hangzhou Asian Games going past the Chinese in their den, backing it up with another bronze medal at the 2024 Asian Championships. A few months back in Doha, Manush and Manav Thakkar became India's first men's doubles pair to reach the WTT Star Contender semis.
All these pairs will be in the mix at Doha, and younger, untested ones at the Asian youth tournament. Post that, and once the format and qualification system for the Olympics is known, Costantini will start planning to firm up pairs with LA in mind and perhaps experiment and expand the combinations and pool.
'With the Olympics, doubles now is more relevant than before,' Costantini said. 'All the countries are starting to prepare and deploy more resources on this. It's something we will have to reflect too.'
It helps that the current combinations have 'delivered historic results', said the Italian, with things 'quite steady and stable' in mixed doubles (Diya/Manush) and men's doubles (Manush/Manav). The latter are world No.9, while the former's win in Tunis was belief-boosting after losing to the Japanese pair in the Doha Star Contender quarter-finals.
'You don't elevate confidence from just getting points winning lower-level tournaments but by beating the relevant world-class players, the kind that maybe you didn't beat before,' Costantini said.
'For me, it's a little summary of the last 6-8 months, since we restarted the cycle after the (Paris) Olympics. Manav and Manush are almost always in the quarters or semis of the bigger tournaments, and so are Manush and Diya. And they're all relatively young.
'For the rest, we will have to assess from time to time, and whether some results are sporadic achievements.'
In the past, such sporadic sparks have faded away in doubles. Manika Batra and Archana Kamath had surged as high as world No.4 in women's doubles but had little to show in terms of big titles. Manika and G Sathiyan teamed up for mixed doubles targetting the Paris Games, and after showing plenty of promise initially, the pair couldn't even qualify. Part of the issue in the Manika-Sathiyan dip was their inability to train together and play enough tournaments.
Lessons will have to be learnt from that to sustain the doubles momentum over the next few years. It's where Costantini's role and presence of a national setup will come into play.
'We have well established a national team environment. If this is not there, players will more likely go in different directions, be more individual, and without a proper plan. One time they will play with somebody, and then somebody else, just to make the volume (for points),' the head coach said. 'The more we strengthen this aspect, the better our planning can be, including in testing certain players and getting them into more competitions.'
Part of that testing was to bring together Manav and Manika, India's highest ranked singles players currently, for mixed doubles in the post-Paris reset. The combination hasn't taken off just as yet. 'They played in a couple of tournaments but haven't had too many opportunities since. Let's see how it shapes up,' he said.