Saurabh Varma and Rituparna Das clinched 81st National badminton Championship title

Rituparna Das and Saurabh Varma, the top seeded badminton players of India had bagged the 81st National Badminton Championship title at Patliputra Sports Complex in February 2016. Rituparna Das, a 21 year old from Telangana, encounter with Reshma Karthik and took the match by 21-12, 21-14. This was her first National Championship title after having reached the finals in 2013 and 2015. In the earlier matches, though she defeated top seeds Anura Prabhudesai and Tanvi Lad with her cross-court drops and net plays, she failed to impress her spectators in the finals.

Reshma made many errors and there were hardly any long rallies. Her errors made Rituparna to save points and led her to win the tournament.

“This time, I had an easy draw. That made it easy. I will now focus on International tournaments and improve my World rankings, which is at 55 at the moment,” said Rituparna.

She is keeping her words by moving top with her World Rankings. Today, she is at 45^th position in Women’s Singles BWF rankings. In Men’s summit clash, Saurabh Varma gave a fairytale end to Lakshya Sen, the 15 year old World no.1 player in Junior Badminton Rankings. Varma won the Men’s Singles title by 21-13 , 21-12.

At the tender age of 15, it is a big match for Sen to reach finals in the National Badminton Championship tournament. It will enable the young lad to check with the errors in post-match sessions and improve the playing style.

Initially, Lakshya was confident enough to win the title but the senior didn’t give any chance to the junior. Saurabh used the court in full swing. He saved the most of the points by forehand and backhand smashes and he hardly let go the net shot drops made by Lakshya.

Till 10 Lakshya tried to level the score, then the game was under Saurabh’s favour. The World No. 41 accelerated further with his jump smashes, and Lakshya couldn’t do much. Saurabh hardly gave time to Lakshya to breath and he made him to stifle throughout the court with his hard deceptive shots.

After reaching the relaxing score of 15-6, Saurabh didn’t look back and clinched the match. This was the second win for 40th seed. He said, “I did beat him in the Syed Modi International tournament recently. So, I knew how to play him.”