Mumbai: The senior World Championships in Doha beginning on Could 17 and the Asian Youth Championships (June 26-July 2) in Tashkent will present the Indian desk tennis workforce’s head coach Massimo Costantini an opportunity to take inventory of and draw a roadmap in an space the place Indians have had higher success at world stage: doubles.
Diya Chitale and Manush Shah on the latest WTT Contender Tunis. (WTT)
The plan assumes higher significance given that every one three doubles occasions will return to the TT programme on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. It’s in these occasions that Indians have made greater strikes extra continuously in prime stage WTT and multi-sport tournaments within the latest previous.
A number of days in the past, Manush Shah and Diya Chitale captured the blended doubles title on the WTT Contender Tunis, beating the higher-ranked Miwa Harimoto and Sora Matsushima of Japan within the closing. A few years in the past, Ayhika Mukherjee and Sutirtha Mukherjee delivered India’s first girls’s doubles medal on the Hangzhou Asian Video games going previous the Chinese language of their den, backing it up with one other bronze medal on the 2024 Asian Championships. A number of months again in Doha, Manush and Manav Thakkar grew to become India’s first males’s doubles pair to achieve the WTT Star Contender semis.
All these pairs will probably be within the combine at Doha, and youthful, untested ones on the Asian youth event. Publish that, and as soon as the format and qualification system for the Olympics is understood, Costantini will begin planning to agency up pairs with LA in thoughts and maybe experiment and broaden the combos and pool.
“With the Olympics, doubles now is more relevant than before,” Costantini mentioned. “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 present combos have “delivered historic results”, mentioned the Italian, with issues “quite steady and stable” in blended doubles (Diya/Manush) and males’s doubles (Manush/Manav). The latter are world No.9, whereas the previous’s win in Tunis was belief-boosting after dropping to the Japanese pair within 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 mentioned.
“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.”
Previously, such sporadic sparks have light away in doubles. Manika Batra and Archana Kamath had surged as excessive as world No.4 in girls’s doubles however had little to indicate when it comes to massive titles. Manika and G Sathiyan teamed up for blended doubles targetting the Paris Video games, and after displaying loads of promise initially, the pair couldn’t even qualify. A part of the problem within the Manika-Sathiyan dip was their incapability to coach collectively and play sufficient tournaments.
Classes must be learnt from that to maintain the doubles momentum over the following few years. It’s the place Costantini’s function and presence of a nationwide 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 top coach mentioned. “The more we strengthen this aspect, the better our planning can be, including in testing certain players and getting them into more competitions.”
A part of that testing was to deliver collectively Manav and Manika, India’s highest ranked singles gamers at the moment, for blended doubles within the post-Paris reset. The mix hasn’t taken off simply as but. “They played in a couple of tournaments but haven’t had too many opportunities since. Let’s see how it shapes up,” he mentioned.