New Delhi: PV Sindhu smashed her way to a second consecutive final in the India Open badminton tournament after she defeated Ratchanok Intanon 21-13, 21-15 at the Siri Fort Sports Complex on Saturday.
The defending champion treated the sizeable crowd that had waited for over eight hours to see the 22-year-old in action did not disappoint her fans as she maintained an aggressive approch through out the 48 minute encounter to set up a summit clash against USA’s Beiwen Zhang.
Sindhu took sometime to get used to the conditions in the opening game but once she got the measure of the drift and the opponent she raced to a 13-3 lead, claiming 12 points in a row, and it was clear that the Indian has adopted an all-out attack plan to counter the Thai.
She rained in smashes and though Intanon tried to fox her with her sliced drops and short serves in the second half of the game, the sizeable lead meant that there was no way to catch up with the Indian.
The second game was a much closer affair with both players engaging in long rallies. But to Sindhu’s credit, the world championship bronze medallist did not lose any opportunity to play those expansive smashes despite the tiring limbs.
The perfect example of Sindhu’s approach was the 34 shot rally early into the second game when the Indian played at least a dozen smashes to win the point.
More importantly, the world number four made very few errors and that meant that Intanon had little chance to make a comeback once the Indian had opened up a lead in both the games.
“I am very happy with my performance today. I did not make many mistakes and played the way I like to play,” said Sindhu after the match.
Speaking about the final, the 22-year-old said she was looking forward to retaining her crown. “I recently played Beiwen in the PBL (Premier Badminton League) and it is going to be another tough match,” she added.
End of road for Chopra-Reddy
Earlier, Pranaav Jerry Chopra and N Sikki Reddy were knocked out after their lost their mixed doubles semifinal against Mathias Christiansen and Christinna Pedersen 21-16, 21-19.
The Indian combination, playing their second semi-final in a major event since reaching the last four stage in the Japan Open Superseries last year, were guilty of making unforced errors on the net in the business end of both games with Chopra even making errors on a couple of serves.
Explaining the mistakes, the 25-year-old said, “Christiansen was returning the service very well and so I was trying to slow down my serve. There was no drift yesterday but today there was some drift and we were playing on the slower side (in the second game) and it went slower.”
Apart from the serve, the Indian combination was slow off the blocks in both the games but never lost sight of their opponents as they would invariable play a couple of big points to close the gap.
While they kept pace till 15-15 in the first game and 18-18 in the second, the lack of patience showed thereafter as they went for tighter shots to finish the rallies earlier. “May be we should have played more in the court rather than going for the points,” admitted Reddy after the match.
Zulkarnain runs out of steam finally
It was also the end of the road for giant killer Iskander Zulkarnain after the Malaysian fell short by a whisker losing 18-21, 21-10, 21-19 against Chinese fourth seed Shi Yuqi in the men’s singles semifinal.
The 26-year-old, who is making a comeback after a back injury, looked set to make his first major final when he opened up a 16-12 lead in the decider. But Yuqi changed the pace of the rallies and adopted a more aggressive approach to seven straight points.
With two match points against him, Zulkarnain played the point of the match when he retrieved almost everything and even injured his knuckles thanks to the diving around he did in the 42 minute rally to force Yuqi into hitting a smash in the net.
However, he obviously could not recover from the effort and lost the next point and the match.
Speaking about the penultimate point of the match, Yuqi said he was frustrated to the point that he started hitting everything to find a winner but nothing worked.
However, the 21-year-old admitted that he was relieved to reach his first final of the year and beginning 2018 on a positive note after an indifferent performance in 2017.
He will now take on third seed Chou Tien Chen of Chinese Taipei, who defeated China’s Qiao Bin 23-21, 21-16 in the other semifinal.