Chennai Lions’ mentor Sharath Kamal is hoping the players rise to the occasion after a tough start to the team’s UTT campaign.
| Photo Credit: File photo: RITU RAJ KONWAR

Three matches. Three losses, albeit narrow ones. No wonder then that Stanley’s Chennai Lions finds itself with its back to the wall in the Ultimate Table Tennis’ sixth edition. A. Sharath Kamal, the stalwart in his first official assignment outside the arena having hung up his boots two months ago, wasn’t willing to throw in the towel yet.

“We are not where we wanted to be. We have been having ups and downs right from the first match. The first match, at least it was equally placed where we went on to seven-each and we lost the final game,” Sharath, the Lions’ mentor, said after the team went down 8-7 against Ahmedabad SG Pipers on Thursday night.

“In the last two ties, we started with a major deficit and that makes it very hard to keep catching up all the time. We have been having some good performances, but we need to start winning up front.”

Not only does Chennai Lions now find itself in a must-win position in the next match against U Mumba TT on Saturday but also needs to beat defending champion Dempo Goa Challengers by a huge margin to give itself a chance of getting closer to the knockouts.

“Tough teams, tough matches. I hope we have one big win. On an average, we need to get on to 40, so you need two matches 10 points each. We are capable of doing that,” said Sharath, with the Lions’ having accumulated 20 points in its first three games.

One of the major problems with the Lions has been the first singles tie where none of their men paddlers has won a game yet. After losing six games on the trot against Kolkata ThunderBlades’ Ankur Bhattacharjee and Jaipur Patriots’ Kanak Jha, Kirill Gerassimenko was shunted down the order on Thursday.

But Payas Jain, the promising Indian, couldn’t take a game off Ricardo Walther on Thursday. “We have been talking to Kirill and he is a quality player. Even Payas was in fantastic shape but went down. That’s where we need to have a start, which is at least putting us on an equal plane going into the mixed doubles.”