India’s Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty reached the men’s double semi-finals at the Thailand Open on Friday with a hard-fought victory against South Korea’s Choi Solgyu and Seo Sueng Jae.
Indian shuttlers suffered defeats in the two remaining matches at the Super 500 tournament on Friday. B Sai Praneeth lost to Japan’s Kanta Tsuneyama in the men’s singles quarter-finals, followed by Satwik and Ashwini Ponnappa’s mixed doubles defeat against the Japanese pair of Yuta Watanabe and Arisa Higashino.
Satwik and Chirag, who will feature in a semifinal at a Super 500 or above tournament for the third time, are the only Indians left in the fray.
The Indian pair had suffered a quarter-final defeat at the Japan Open last week but held heir nerve in Bangkok to win 21-17, 17-21, 21-19 in exactly one hour in their last eight match.
Satwiksairaj and Shetty maintained a four-point lead for much of the first game and went on to bag it comfortably at the end. It was neck and neck till the halfway stage of the second game but the South Koreans went on the offensive at that point.
Solgyu and Sueng Jae took the second game and raced to an 8-4 lead in the decider. The match seemed to have slipped away from the Indians at that point but they dug in deep and fought back.
The third and final game saw both pairs exchange a point each for the most part but Rankireddy and Shetty managed to hold their nerves at the end and eke out the win. They will now face another South Korean pair (ranked three places below them) – Ko Sung Hyun and Shin Baek Cheol – in the semi-finals on Saturday. It is worth mentioning that the world No 1 duo of Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo and Marcus Fernaldi Gideon were upset in the quarter-final, paving the way for the up and coming Indian pair to go all the way, should they keep up their winning run.
They reached their first semi-final of 2019 on the BWF World Tour circuit. They have won Brazil International Challenge earlier and reached the semis at Denmark Challenge.
Talking after the match Satwik said, “With every tournament we can see our game improving. In today’s match, we knew if we stay positive and confident till the end; we can win and we really played well in the last two points in the end.
“Both of us are making strategies for every point on court and this has helped us to win crucial points which otherwise we have been losing also staying calm and positive at the end has really worked in our favour,” he added.
Later, Sai Praneeth, who was the only singles players left in contention on Friday, suffered a straight games defeat (18-21, 12-21) against seventh seed Kenta Tsuneyama. Sai Praneeth played well in flashes but Tsuneyama was just too good when it mattered in both games. The Japanese shuttler won 10 of the last 13 points to end India’s singles campaign in Bangkok.
In the final match of the day, Ashwini Ponnappa and Satwiksairaj were knocked out as third seeds Yuta Watanabe and Arisa Higashino proved to be a hurdle too tough to clear. The Japanese duo won 21-13, 21-15 in less than 30 minutes. It marked the end of a good week for the Indian duo, who defeated the Olympic silver medallists in the first round.