New Delhi: A year after she became the first Indian paddler to reach Round of 16 at the Olympics, outplayed a former world champion and world No.2 on her way to her maiden quarter-finals at Saudi Smash, and became the first Indian table tennis player to make it all the way to the last eight at a WTT Champions competition, Manika Batra is very modest in her assessment.
“It’s been a pretty even year,” she says. “I have won some, lost some. ‘I think it was to the Paris Olympics to make it to the third round and I really enjoyed the victory against world no.2 Wang Manyu. I am by no means done and resigned. I always aim higher.”
That means Manika Batra now has her sights set on the top-15 next year. Currently at 25th, two spots down on world number one Sreeja Akula who is currently the highest placed Indian woman in the world, the 29-year-old feels she has the skill to keep beating the best in the world.
“15th place is a doable number given the belief and play I have. This year I’ve gotten more than confident to always beat the higher level players. I’m very happy to start the new Olympic cycle here in this brain,” Batra, who was the first Indian woman paddler to crack the top-25 earlier this year, tells me.
If, after Paris, most players took a hiatus from their games in order to reset their calendar, Batra soon got used to comfors. “I had been going to spend time with family, but after a week I started to crave going back to the training. I love to train, and am not a big fan of long rests because they break the flow. The physical, mental and technical conditioning is very hard to get into the top 10 if you want to beat them.”” [T]he players here are very disciplined.
A major career step following the Olympics was splitting from G Sathiyan after three years together at mixed doubles. Manika Batra will join world No.60 Manav Thakkar in season 2. The pair played their first match in Asia last October at the Asian Championships where they lost in the second round against Singapore’s Ser Lin Qian and Yew En Koen Pang.
“I don’t feel we practiced as a duo enough going into that tournament,” Batra said. “I’ve been too short and not had the time to hone in on Manav’s game yet but if we’re going to go win medals and knock out good pairs we’ll need to pound the gym together”.
“We didn’t make it all the way at the Asian Championships but I realised we could drop balls at each other whenever needed. So that’s starting a great point but we will have to figure out how to train together”, said Manika Batra who trains in Hyderabad and Mumbai. Thakkar’s schooling, meanwhile, is distributed between Chennai, Surat and Germany.
In her own game, Manika Batra’s goal this season will be to try out some technical adjustments, which was impossible this year because of busy season. Batra and her coach Aman Balgu will look back on her game again after training starts this month.
“My coach Aman and I had found a few spots but there was just no time to work due to two events in 2024. And I will go back to the drawing board and tinker with those small technical tweaks. Then there’s the World Championships next year and one of my aims is to get a medal,” she says.
Manika Batra will miss out on the mixed team World Cup in Chengdu for now, but she will play for Ma Long-led Team Asian as the only Indian player in the Waldner’s Cup later this month (December 13-15). The event dedicated to the memory of table tennis great Jan-Ove Waldner will take place in Oslo, Norway, and will see the best of Asia and the world meet.