Indian Chirag Shetty, left, and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy
Satwiksraj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty reached the men’s doubles final at the Singapore Open Super 750 after defeating the top seeds and world number one duo Kim Won Ho and Seo Seung Jae of South Korea in straight matches on Saturday.The fourth-seeded Indian duo defeated the world champions 21-19, 21-18 in the semi-final, which lasted 52 minutes.Satwik and Chirag will now face the winner of the other semi-final between third-seeded Indonesian duo Fajr Alfian and Mohd Shohibul Fikri and fifth-seeded Chinese duo Liang Weikang and Zhang Wang in the final on Sunday.However, there was disappointment for Dhruv Kapila and Tanesha Crasto in the mixed doubles.
The Indian duo lost 16-21, 21-17, 13-21 to Japanese players Yuichi Shimogami and Sayaka Hobara in the semi-finals.The men’s doubles competition was close from the start. The Korean duo led 13-11 midway through the second half of the opener, but Satwik and Chirag stayed in touch and fought back to win the match 21-19.The Indians found themselves trailing again in game two, trailing 11-14 at one point. But they recovered again, and scored important points in the final minutes to complete their victory in a consecutive match and achieve their first victory over the Korean duo.
After the match, Chirag said that the duo remained confident even when they were trailing.“Even when we were down, we continued to support each other and stay put and in the end we knew they would collapse at some point and if we stuck to our plans we knew it would work out. We had that faith and things worked out well for us,” Chirag said.Satwik explained the approach that helped them turn the game around.
How confident are you that Satwik and Chirag will win the final?
“They kept putting pressure on the net, I felt they were not in a comfortable position to defend.
“It’s always a slow start for us, we need to adapt a little bit.”Chirag also said that the duo is making steady progress.“I think we are moving in the right direction and improvement is a continuous process, you will never be perfect, there is always room for improvement and we continue to push ourselves and we believe we are on the right path.”The win was Satwik and Chirag’s first against the world No. 1 Korean group despite coming close in their previous meetings.“We played them only twice, once last year in the semi-finals of the Indian Open, Malaysia Open and the China Final. The match was close but we realized that if we wanted to beat them we had to be consistent because we knew they had the strongest defense on the circuit,” Chirag said.