India's star table tennis player Sathiyan Gnanasekaran has bemoaned "unfair umpiring" at World Table Tennis (WTT) Contender Lagos 2024, which he believes led to his second-round ouster in the men's singles event. Sathiyan suffered a 2-3 (8-11, 8-11, 11-4, 11-5, 6-11) loss to France's Thibault Poret to crash out of the competition. (More Sports News)
Sathiyan took issue with the medical time-out granted to Thibault in the final set, as also the service fault that the Indian was handed while leading 3-1 in the same set. The paddler said the decisions adversely affected his rhythm and termed the incident "beyond imagination".
Calling it "unfair umpiring at its worst" in his series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Sathiyan wrote: "I never normally complain about these things but what just happened today is beyond imagination & was totally unfair."
He added: "I made a good comeback from 2 sets down & was leading 2-0 in the final set , the opponent was given a service fault (he was even given a warning before), after a lot of quarrel with the referee, out of the blue, he just takes a medical timeout just to kill time, when he had no medical issue until then and to my surprise it was granted as well.
"And then when I was leading 3-1 in the last set, I was given a service fault out of nowhere without even a warning, in the serve in which I was getting a lot of points, probably just to make it even which totally spoiled my rhythm."
Sathiyan further wrote: "We players work so hard and such kind of unfair umpiring at the international level & to rob a match like this is certainly very disappointing."
Meanwhile, in other results, India's Sreeja Akula and Ayhika Mukherjee won comfortably to enter the quarter-finals in Lagos. The women's doubles pair of Sutirtha Mukherjee and Ayhika Mukherjee too advanced in the competition.
