Indonesia Open: India’s star pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty reached the final of the Indonesia Open in Jakarta on Saturday as they made their first appearance in a Super 1000 summit clash. Seung Jae Seo of Korea and then came back to win the match in three games. However, Indian fans were left disappointed as HS Prannoy suffered a straight-game defeat to top seed Viktor Axelsen of Denmark.
Satwik and Chirag were down 17-21 in the first game, but came back to win the next two games 21-19 and 21-18. He now holds a 3-2 head-to-head record over Kang and Seo. Meanwhile, Prannoy went down 15-21, 15-21 to keep his record against Axelsen at 2-6.
“We really feel good about the way we played today. They came back in the third game but we stayed till the end and I’m glad we didn’t run away from our strategy. We stayed with it till the end,” he said. ” For the first time we are in a Super 1000 final and so it feels good,” Chirag said after the win.
He said, “They (the Koreans) have a really strong defense, so it was like an attack versus defense game. You can’t blindly attack them. We were mixing it up.”
The Indian pair was trailing 3-6 in the first game and then kept playing catch-up games. The Indians reduced the margin to 15–19 but then trailed 17–21. In the second game, he stayed in rhythm and took a 6-3 lead and then made a quick run to take the score to 11-4. Even though the Koreans made a comeback to make it 18-15, the Indians tied it at 21-19. In the decider, the Indian pair took a 12-5 lead and despite being level at 16-16, Satwik and Chirag managed to capture the decider.
The Indians will now take on world champions W Y Soh and A Chia in the final.