India’s most prominent badminton players left the Denmark Open early this week, leaving the women’s doubles pair of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand and a few singles players to carry the challenge into the later rounds, according to Telangana Today, myKhel, Sportscape Magazine and Zee News. Sportscape Magazine described the campaign as disappointing for India.
The men’s doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty lost their opening match 1-2 to He Ji Ting and Ren Xiang Yu of China, according to a search summary. The pair had been billed as one of India’s main hopes, with Telangana Today’s preview saying that India banks on them and on PV Sindhu. A match that goes to three games is a close one, but the reports reviewed do not give the scores of the games.
Ayush Shetty lost to Indonesia’s Alwi Farhan 1-2 in the men’s singles round of 32, according to the same summary. Lakshya Sen and PV Sindhu both lost their opening matches, according to the summary, and the reports reviewed do not give the scores, opponents or durations of those matches except for Sindhu’s draw.
Sindhu’s draw was the hardest in the event. She had been drawn against the world number one, An Se-young of South Korea, in the first round, according to myKhel’s headline. An unseeded or lower-seeded player meeting the top seed in round one is a matter of the draw, and the report does not say whether the Indian was seeded. Beating the world number one in a first round would be an upset, so the loss is not surprising, but IndiaX24 has not seen the score.
Sportscape Magazine’s round-of-16 preview named Kidambi Srikanth, Tanvi Sharma, Ashmita Chaliha and Treesa Jolly-Gayatri Gopichand as the Indian challenge that remained after the first round.
Of the four, Srikanth lost to Alex Lanier 21-11, 15-21, 15-21, Ashmita lost to Akane Yamaguchi, and Treesa-Gayatri beat the fifth seeds 21-16, 21-17, as IndiaX24 reports in separate articles. That leaves India with one confirmed quarterfinalist pair and one reported singles quarterfinalist, Tanvi Sharma.
The reasons for the early exits are not analysed in the reports reviewed. The Denmark Open is a high-level tournament in the Super 750 category, and early draws against top seeds are common, which is general background. IndiaX24 does not attribute the results to injury, form or scheduling because no report does so.
The results come after a successful stretch for Indian sport at the Asian Games, which IndiaX24 has covered, and the reports reviewed do not link the two. They also do not give the world rankings of the players, so no judgement can be made about whether the results were upsets.
One feature of the results is the number of games. Satwik-Chirag lost in three games, 1-2, and so did Ayush Shetty, 1-2, according to the summary, so both were competitive matches that went the distance and not heavy defeats. The reports reviewed do not give the scores of the individual games, so IndiaX24 cannot say how close they were.
India’s next badminton events are not named in the reports reviewed. IndiaX24 will report on Treesa and Gayatri’s quarterfinal.
Image: PV Sindhu (file photo). Photo by Government of India, licensed under Government Open Data License – India, via Wikimedia Commons.
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