All England Open: Sindhu loses the semis after the hard fight

An overwhelming distress created when PV Sindhu lost her semi-final encounter against Japan’s Akane Yamaguchi at the prestigious All England Open Championships notwithstanding the top-class training and fitness regimen in Birmingham on Saturday.

The hard-fought three-game event with a 21-19, 19-21, 18-21 loss for the Indian lasted for 79 minutes. With this, Sindhu marked another head-to-head loss with 4-6 against Yamaguchi.

Playing her maiden All England Open semi-finals, Sindhu drifted with a body smash and pocketed her first point. Soon, she surged to a 6-0 lead, from where Yamaguchi fought back against the lanky Indian and where she broke the break with 11-5 advantage.

Continuing her dominance after the breather, extended her lead to 17-10 with a deceptive shot before Yamaguchi rebounded to win seven points on the trot to make the score 17-17. However, Sindhu without losing focus, wrapped the game in 20 minutes.

In the second game, Sindhu was trailing with 3-4, after the initial exchanges, as her drop shot found the net followed by 26 shots rally. Players parred each other at 9-9, before Yamaguchi went on to the break with a two-point advantage of 11-9.

Sindhu levelled the score at 12-12 followed by winning the 44-shot rally. However, Yamaguchi came up with a cross-court smash to take 17-14 lead. The Japanese then grabbed the match into the decider.

In the final game, both the players tested each other’s limit as the game initiated with a long rally. Sindhu cruised the break with a 11-7 lead, before extending the lead to 13-7.

World No. 2, however, won four consecutive points to reduce the deficit and levelled the game at 14-14 within no time. Eventually, the Japanese went down to win 21-18 to secure the finals berth.  

Previously, in the quarter finals match, Sindhu overcame the vigorous fight against the seventh seeded Nozomi Okuhara of Japan.

Sindhu mustered after the game down to defeat the Japanese with 20-22, 21-18, 21-18 in the wearing 84-minute encounter to level the head-to-head tally with 5-5 against the world no. 6.

In the men’s singles quarter finals, the unseeded HS Prannoy was defeated by the world no. 42 Huang Yuxiang with 22-10, 16-21, 21-23. This was the farthest ever round that Prannoy has reached so far at the All England Open. In 2015 and 2017 he was ousted in the second round, while in 2016 he bowed out in the opening round.