PV Sindhu storms into quarterfinals of Thailand Open

PV Sindhu reached quarterfinals of the Thailand Open on Thursday. She defeated Hong Kong’s Yip Pui Yin in straight game win at the USD 350,000 Thailand Open World Super 500 tournament in Bangkok.

It was not happy day for the Indian shuttlers but Olympic silver medalist P V Sindhu continued her impressive run with a 21-16 21-14 win over the 30 year old to set up a fight with USA’s Soniia Cheah.

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Elsewhere, Parupalli Kashyap put up a brave fight before going down 18-21, 21-18, 19-21 to Japan’s Kanta Tsuneyama. She was the 2014 Commonwealth games champion. Meanwhile, fourth seed H S Prannoy also went down 18-21, 14-21 to Indonesia’s Sony Dwi Kuncoro to crash out of the tournament.

In men’s doubles, Indian’s Manu Attri and B Sumeeth Reddy showed their mettle and displayed great fight but couldn’t get past Japanese world no 16 pair of Hiroyuki Endo and Yuta Watanabe. They succumbed to a 24-22, 13-21, 19-21 defeat in a hard fought 66 minute encounter.

Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Ashwini Ponnappa also lost 11-21, 16-21 to Japanese combo of Yuki Kaneko and Mayu Matsumoto in the mixed doubles.

The only positive result for Indian fans came from 37-minute women’s singles match wherein PV Sindhu looked comfortable from the beginning. She was placed on 7-3 at one stage in the opening game and extended the advantage to 19-11. Yip Pui Yin tried to make a comeback and narrowed the deficit to 16-19 before the Indian marched ahead to clinch the first game.

In the second game, the Hyderabadi begun in a similar fashion taking up an advantage with the score reading as 8-4. Once again Pui Yin came close with three straight points but the Indian jumped to 12-7 lead and Sindhu gave no more opportunities to her opponent to make any sort of comebacks.