Dubai: The UAE will field a 12-man team in the singles and doubles events of the 2009 GCC Table Tennis Championship, which starts at Al Nasr Club Wednesday.
No 1 ranked UAE player Rashid Abdul Hamid will be joined by three other players, Faisal Abbas, Rashid Mohammad and Jasem Linjawy, in the men's singles event, while Walid Ahmad, Mohammad Mahmoud, Yousuf Ahmad and Butti Saeed will vie for the medals in the junior singles event.
Meanwhile, Hamad Mohammad Abdullah, Nasser Mohammad, Hussain Ali and Saud Abdullah will fly the UAE flag in the cadets class, which has been reserved for players less than 15 years of age.
Abdul Hamid, who is also the No 2 seed in the tournament, starts the event with a bye, while Linjawy has a tough round one opponent in Kuwait's Hussain Al Bahraini, who had a good outing in the teams event. Abbas has another strong rival in Qatari Waleed Abdullah and Rashid Mohammad faces Rashid Al Majid of Bahrain in the opening round.
With some exceptional performances in the teams event, including a 3-2 victory over tournament top seed Ebrahim Hassan, UAE star Abdul Hamid, one of the pre-tournament favourites, underlined himself as the man to beat.
But he exercised modesty and downplayed his chances saying his victory over Hassan was due to the latter's lengthy absence from the GCC circuit. "Ebrahim has been the GCC champion for a long time, but kept away recently because he lost his father and he hadn't played for some time. This is sport; sometimes you win and sometimes you don't," Abdul Hamid, who represents Al Nasr Club domestically, said.
The UAE had a fair amount of practice prior to the start of the tournament with the UAE Table Tennis Federation conducting a training camp in Ras Al Khaimah, during which the Emirates contingent played practice matches against players from China and Egypt. And that experience, according to Abdul Hamid, will prove crucial as the UAE searches for its first medals in the men's category.
"The training camps were good and helped us tremendously, but competition is one thing and you have to be at your best. I'm feeling confident because of the way things have gone and I hope we can win something this time because this tournament is in our homeland."
