Birmingham: World Number two Saina Nehwal has advanced to the quarterfinals of the All England Championship with a victory in straight sets over Belaetrix Manuputi of Indonesia in the second round of women's singles competition on Thursday. This match lasted for 34 minutes and Saina simply displayed her domination throughout the game.
It was a match to qualify for quarterfinal that was played at National Indoor Arena, where Saina defeated Belaetrix by the score-line of 21-16 21-11. Saina will now take on sixth seed Chinese Shixian Wang on Friday. Saina used her smashes very well to outclass her Indonesian counterpart, who gave Saina a tough time but Balaetrix didn’t have enough fire to stop her.
Saina took a comprehensive lead and was standing at a score-line of 7-3, but after that she gave Belaetrix some breathing space and she did no mistakes to reach the equalizer at 12-12. However, Saina went on to win the first game.
In the second game, Saina was showing her sheer domination and was 11-2 up. Belaetrix tried her level best, but Indian ace didn’t give her any chance whatsoever and she sealed the berth for quarters quite comfortably.
However budding Indian Shuttler P V Sindhu, lost her game in straight sets and was defeat by fourth seed Juliane Schenk of Germany in the pre-quarterfinals. World number 16, Sindhu suffered a 17-21, 14-21 loss to the German in a 39-minute women's singles match here.
Juliane smashes left Sindhu with no clue. Though Sindhu took 5-1 lead but she could not maintain it and very soon Juliane caught up at 6-6, before the German took the game away with four straight points.
In the second game, Sindhu once again took an advantage of 3-0 but the Juliane surpassed her after whirling off five consecutive points and then kept Sindhu under pressure by raising the margin of lead.
Meanwhile, Parupalli Kashyap has also booked his place in the pre-quarterfinals of singles event after getting a straight-game win over Jen Hao Hsu of Chinese Taipei last night. World number nine, Kashyap won his first round match 21-17 21-18 in 43 minutes. He will now take on the seventh seed Kenichi Tago of Japan later tonight.
One more good news came in for Indian fans, when Sourabh Verma made it to the round of 16 in the men's singles event. Verma beat Dionysius Hayom Rumbaka of Indonesia 10-21 21-14 24-22 in a hard-fought match which went on till 59thminute. His next match is now against eighth seed Tien Minh Nguyen of Vietnam in the pre-quarters later.
It was, however, curtains for Ajay Jayaram who lost 21-15 18-21 10-21 to Zhengming Wang of China in the opening round.
Jwala Gutta and V Diju, who earlier made it to the pre-quarterfinals, too lost 17-21 16-21 defeat to Polish pair of Robert Mateusiak and Nadiezda Zieba in a mixed doubles match.