How pimpled bat surface, quick twiddle got Manika gold at CWG : The Tribune India

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How pimpled bat surface, quick twiddle got Manika gold at CWG

NEW DELHI:For both Neha Agarwal and Manika Batra, the past and the reigning queens of table tennis, their coach Sandip Gupta is a genius, someone who shut out critics with a style of play and equipment shunned by all.

How pimpled bat surface, quick twiddle got Manika gold at CWG

Manika won two gold medals at the Commonwealth Games. file



Vinayak Padmadeo

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 21

For both Neha Agarwal and Manika Batra, the past and the reigning queens of table tennis, their coach Sandip Gupta is a genius, someone who shut out critics with a style of play and equipment shunned by all.

Neha and Manika are among the rare players who use a TT bat with a pimpled surface on the outside, while the smooth side of the rubber is attached to the sponge. The player strikes the ball with the pimpled surface.

But as Neha and Manika explained, they had to face criticism as this style of play was highly discouraged both home and abroad. They were ticked off for using ‘funny rubber’ or ‘negative rubber’, the one that can never win points.

“We were both criticised for the pimpled rubber. But now we have done well,” Manika, who won two gold among four medals at the Gold Coast CWG, said during a felicitation ceremony organised by the Table Tennis Federation of India. “I have won but this doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels. This journey is only starting. It means I have to work and train all the more harder to sustain this.”

Critics

Neha was more forthcoming about what the critics thought of their choice of bat surface.

“Everybody said ‘your backhand is handicap’, as they thought it was crippling our play. This is a game of attack so if you don’t have enough weapons, it is difficult to survive. So everybody used to think that it was a handicap,” Neha said.

“Ours was a highly discouraged method but today you see a player of that stature playing with that rubber has proved them wrong. People had never imagined that we can win a Commonwealth Games gold with this rubber,” she said.

Ripple effect

The pimpled rubber creates a ripple effect and the returns if executed well more often than not confuse the opposing player. “You give a particular kind of spin, and the pimples react in such a way that they give back the opposite spin in return. If you get topspin you will get backspin in return. So it produces the opposite spin effect which confuses the opposition player,” Neha, the Beijing Olympian, explained.

Besides, the pimpled surface has a big advantage in controlling the ball speed during the rally. “What changing the rubber does is, it changes the speed and the spin altogether,” Neha added. “Reduce the speed and the spin and then you twiddle your racket and give back a different spin (during the rally). The opponent is getting so many variations in spin and speed that it is difficult to analyse and understand in a match situation.”

Manika beat world No. 4 Tianwei Feng in the team event and then demolished Mengyu Yu in straight games in the singles final to become the first Indian woman to win a singles gold medal at the Commonwealth Games.

The breakthrough came after years of sweat and snub. “The thing with this rubber is that you can slow down the speed of rally, but back then it was difficult to gain a point. Basically you were waiting for the opponent to make an error. For years they have been waiting for Manika to use the conventional rubber bat but here we are,” coach Gupta said. “We had been using this strategy first with Neha and we started to see results. We developed a new weapon. We used the rubber to reduce the speed of the ball and then quickly change the grip and use the plain side to attack. The shock effect of this variation has worked wonders,” he added.

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