BANGALORE: Former Junior National champion Anand Pawar of Air India caused the biggest upset of the IFCI 76th Senior National open championship when he sent the defending champion Arvind Bhat of Petroleum packing with a 21-9, 21-19 victory to enter the quarterfinals at the KBA Stadium on Monday morning.
For Pawar it was a sweet revenge as he had lost to Arvind Bhat earlier in the inter-state championship final. In fact he ran Arvind Bhat close in that match and that proved to be crucial for him on Monday. He was determined to make amends for that defeat and played with great focus and attacked right from the start giving a rather sluggish Arvind Bhat not much of a chance to settle into his rhythm. As his coach and father Uday Pawar later observed: “We did not want to give Arvind any leeway because he is such a tricky player and wanted to keep him always under pressure.” Pawar raced to a 7-2 lead in the first game with series of smashes and neat placements and stretched it to a match-winning lead of 15-6 and Bhat could hardly bridge that big deficit as Anand Pawar cantered to a 21-9 victory.
The second game saw a much better contest as Arvind came up with some strong half-smashes and well judged tosses while Pawar made mistakes at the net. Bhat led 15-11 before the stocky and gritty Pawar valiantly fought back to tie the score at 16-all and forged ahead to match point at 20-16 Bhat was down but not out as he saved three match poins and came within a whisker (19-20) of pushing the game into extra points before Pawar with a smash sealed the match in his favour.
A delighted Pawar took his t-shirt off on the court and tossed in the air doing a victory jig to the warm applause from those present.
There were more disappointment for Karnataka fans as Aditya Prakash also made his exit losing a fiercely contested match to K Nandagopal of AAI at 22-20, 18-21, 22-20.
Another local lad Mohit Kamat representing Railways went down to RMV Gurusai Dutt of PSPB while Alshit Mahajan of Maharashtra prevailed over fifth seed Pratul Joshi of Air India. Other seeded players including second seed B Sai Praneeth and fourth seed HS Prannoy entered the quarterfinals.