New Delhi: Olympian Achanta Sharath Kamal and Subhajit Saha assured India of a medal from table tennis when they beat English pair of Andrew Baggaley and L Pitchford 3-2 to enter the final of the men's doubles final at the Commonwealth Games here on Wednesday.
However, Soumyadeep Roy could not clear the semifinal hurdle as he meekly surrendered to world number 17 Gao Ning of Singapore, going down 0-4 at the Yamuna Sports Complex.
Sharath, who is currently ranked 40th in the ITTF list along with former national champion Saha, fought hard from the onset.
Although they conceded the first game 11-13 to the English pair, they came back strongly bagging the second game 11-7. However, the scales again tilted in favour of their English rivals who got the next game 11-7.
It was a tooth and nail battle in the fourth game, which the Indians won 12-10 and then clinched the final game 11-6 to book their berth in the finals.
Sharath-Saha will now meet Singaporeans Gao and Yang Zi, who eased past Australian duo of W Henzell and R Frank 3-0 in the other semifinal, in the gold medal-match.
"In the final game, we maintained the lead and came back to win the match. We just had to keep the ball in play; they were waiting for us to miss but we did not," Sharath said after the match.
In the men's singles semifinal, Soumyadeep started on a disppointing note and lost the first two games at an identical score of 2-11.
But after that, the Bengal paddler tried hard to stage a comeback into the contest and gave some anxious moments to the experienced Singaporean.
However, the experienced Gao won the two games 11-9, 11-7 and wrapped up the issue.
"I started bad and also made some bad serves. But I gave him a tough fight," Soumyadeep said after crashing out of the event.
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