Manika Batra’s dreamy Paris Olympics run ends in nervy match against Miu Hirano

With a confident glint in her eyes, Manika Batra crouched so low to serve that only her Olympic rings and tri-colour painted fingernails protruded over the table. By the time she emerged to launch the slice serve to open the match, the trailblazing Olympian was gripped by nerves.

The ball tumbled into the net, and Manika smiled and shrugged. For the rest of the night, the shrug remained but the smile had disappeared.

Painful as it was to watch, she fought with the demons in her head and endured a meltdown in full public view. In between the rare ‘cho’ — her rallying cry every time she connected well with the ball — Manika had looks of disgust and disbelief, she flung the paddle once on the table and smashed the ball on the floor, slapped her thigh in anger and looked disconsolately at her coaches — Aman Balgu in the stands and Massimo Constantini in her corner.

Manika lost 1-4 (6-11, 9-11, 14-12, 8-11, 6-11) to Japan’s Miu Hirano in the Round of 16 of the Paris Olympics in a 47-minute match, at the end of which she exited the North Paris Arena with her head bowed. It was a campaign, however, that she need not feel embarrassed about.

Fighting for a spot in the quarterfinals of the Olympics was an uncharted territory not just for Manika but for Indian table tennis overall. To match the occasion, Manika said she felt the need to do something ‘different’. “I was trying to win, win, win, win… and then lost my calmness. She (Miu) didn’t do anything different today, but I had to,” Manika said after the match.

Indeed, Miu was simply being herself. The Japanese star is a player unlike many on the circuit. She used her shoulders to hit the ball off the bounce rather than waiting to meet it on the highest point. It was a high-risk strategy fraught with risk because, as it happened during a couple of points, she missed the ball. But it also got her high rewards, as she dominated the rallies with her speed and attacked Manika’s shots aggressively.

Miu started by targetting, using her backhand, Manika’s forehand, which wasn’t flowing. As the match progressed, the direction of her attacks changed and she began to cramp Manika for space on the backhand side, placing the ball a couple of inches away from the hip. Manika didn’t have an answer to that — a couple of times, she just caught the ball and returned it to her opponent.

But as much as Miu’s counter-hitting, this was also a match where nerves got the better of Manika. At one point, when coach Constantini sensed trouble as the momentum was swinging rapidly in Miu’s favour, he called for a time-out. “You hit the ball too nervously,” said the Italian. “Think what kind of spin you can give…”

It was the first time Constantini made direct intervention; until then he was sitting in the chair and wildly gesticulating, telling Manika all the things she could do better. And there were many.

When she raced to early leads only to allow Miu to come back, Constantini would tell her to make the Japanese move rather than keeping the ball within her reach. When Manika did that — cleverly playing at Miu’s backhand and then changing the direction with the next shot — she got instant results.

When she got this part of the game right, the serves would elude her, falling so nicely for Miu that she could start the rallies on the front foot. Constantini would once again signal from behind, in vain, to mix things up.

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With nothing going her way, Manika began to lose her cool. In the first game, when Miu erased a three-point advantage, Manika dumped her racquet on the table and walked in an opposite direction. After Miu recovered the lost ground similarly in the second, Manika looked helplessly first and Balgu and then towards Constantini. When she mounted a slight comeback by winning the third, Manika raised her fist and punched the air aggressively in Miu’s direction, but in the fourth after the Japanese foxed her with her speed and spin, Manika would helplessly laugh at herself.

“I could have put in more effort,” Manika said. “Internally, I am not happy with myself with how I started the match. Today, I can be sad. From tomorrow, I have to prepare for my team event.”

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