Badminton Asia Championships 2023: PV Sindhu loses to An Se Young in quarter-finals
It was Sindhu’s sixth loss against An Se Young in as many matches. Satwiksairaj Rankireddy-Chirag Shetty assured of bronze after making it to the semi-finals.
Badminton
Former world champion PV Sindhu crashed out of the Badminton Asia Championships 2023 after losing to world No. 2 An Se Young in her women’s singles quarter-final match in Dubai on Friday.
Playing at the Sheikh Rashid Bin Hamdan Indoor Hall, PV Sindhu, 11th in the badminton world rankings, suffered her sixth straight defeat against the South Korean shuttler by going down 21-18, 5-21, 9-21.
PV Sindhu, a two-time Olympic medallist, began well and won the first game despite trailing 13-16 at one stage. PV Sindhu had never won a game against An Se Young in their previous five meetings.
An Se Young dominated the second game. In the third, PV Sindhu engaged in longer rallies but An Se Young proved tough to crack and ran away with the game convincingly.
At the last edition of the Asian championships held in Manila last year, PV Sindhu settled for bronze after losing to Akane Yamaguchi in the semi-finals. PV Sindhu also won a bronze in 2014.
Commonwealth Games 2022 men’s doubles champions Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, meanwhile, defeated the third-seeded pair of Mohammad Ahsan and Hendra Setiawan of Indonesia 21-11 21-12 in the quarter-finals.
By making the cut for the semi-finals, the duo assured India of a bronze medal - the country’s first in men’s doubles at the continental championships in 52 years.
“Playing against senior players like them (the Indonesian duo), there is no strategy,” Satwiksairaj Rankireddy said after the match. “They can come back at any time; they have that mindset. So from starting onwards, we didn’t take it as pressure and we tried to enjoy every point.”
In the men’s singles event, India’s Thomas Cup hero and world No. 9 HS Prannoy forfeited his match against world No. 15 Kanta Tsuneyama of Japan midway due to injury. HS Prannoy was a game down and was trailing 9-13 in the second game when he was forced to retire hurt.
Earlier in the day, India’s mixed doubles team of Rohan Kapoor-N Sikki Reddy lost to the world No. 19 duo of Dejan Ferdinansyah-Gloria Emanuelle Widjaja from Indonesia 18-21, 21-19, 15-21 in the quarter-finals.