‘He needs to get a little brash’

Merchant speaks about a time when Mehta was close to quitting two years ago. “We had a long chat at the airport where I told him he had to approach his challenge year by year,” Merchant recalls.

This decluttering paid off as Mehta stopped seeing his England sojourns as burdens and got down to long hours of practice — almost meditative zones.

More intriguingly,Mehta had been nursing phobias against certain players. His game crumbled when he faced off against certain names,which in his head he blew up to be monsters. “Twice,he lost in Asian final and he struggled to win the Nationals for the longest,” Merchant says,happy that his performances have slowly but surely chipped away at this irrational fear.

At Colombia,Mehta first got the better of Joe Perry,a favourite at the World Games and ranked No. 19 in the world. The Indian,ranked 74,then got the better of Thai World No. 64 Dechawat Poomjaeng. Though the matches were short — best of 5 frames — Mehta’s methodical,calculative approach had helped him blunt his opposition. By the time Wenbo fetched up as the Chinese challenger to the gold medal,Mehta had accumulated enough confidence to puncture his aggression.

However,much work lies in store for Mehta if he has to carry forward this momentum. “He will have the confidence now. But Aditya’s not known particularly for his winning ‘habit’. People should start fearing him and he should aim at dominating his opponents,” Merchant urges on.

Merchant is a tad impatient about the rankings that both Mehta and Pankaj Advani have managed till now and ventures that the youngsters ought to have been in the Top 50 given their commitment and resources at their disposal.

“With Aditya,I keep reiterating that he needs to change his attitude. He’s too much of a good boy in snooker,too politically correct and far too much of a conformist. He needs to get a little brash,in your face and he’ll see the results,” he says,a rare senior urging brattishness from a colt.