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Olympians Manika Batra, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manav Thakkar and Harmeet Desai will be headlining a 10-member Indian contingent for the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) World Team Table Tennis Championships being held in London from Tuesday.
The matches for the World Championships will be played in London and will feature separate men's and women's competitions, Swaythling Cup and the Corbillon Cup, respectively. The ties will consist of upto five single matches, and the first team to win three rubbers will progress to the next round, as per Olympics.com. There are a total of 64 teams, divided in four groups of 16, will feature in each of the men's and women's events. The top two seeded groups, featuring the top seven teams plus hosts England, start in Stage 1a; the remaining teams play in Stage 1b. All eight teams from Stage 1a will move to Stage 2, which will consist of knockout games. However, they still play group games to determine the seedings in the next stage. Meanwhile, from Stage 1b, the 14 group winners and six best second-placed teams qualify for Stage 2. The remaining eight second-placed teams will have to play extra preliminary round of matches to determine four further qualifiers. The knockout stage will start from round of 32 stage onwards and will go on till the finals. The Indian men's challenge is led by world number 38 Thakkar and India is drawn in group seven of stage 1b alongside Slovakia, Tunisia and Guatemala. The women's team will be led by world number 49 Manika, and they will lock horns with Ukraine, Uganda and Rwanda in Group 6 of Stage 1b. The World Team Table Tennis C'ships were first hosted as a standalone competition back in 2000, and since then, China has been a dominant force at the competition. Other than Sweden's men's title triumph in 2000 and Singapore's women's title win in 2010, China have won all other titles. The World Team Table Tennis Championships 2026 will conclude on May 10. *World Table Tennis Championships 2026: India squad -Men's team: Manav Thakkar, Manush Shah, G Sathiyan, Harmeet Desai, Payas Jain -Women's team: Manika Batra, Yashaswini Ghorpade, Diya Chitale, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Syndrela Das. (ANI)
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