Kidambi Srikanth failed to take advantage of a depleted draw as he suffered a surprising loss in the opening round of the All England Open Badminton Championships to unseeded Nhat Nguyen on Wednesday. Parupalli Kashyap also lost in the opening round to world champion Kento Momota, who was playing his first tournament in over a year.
PV Sindhu notched a comfortable win to continue her strong form from the Swiss Open earlier this month. She will be joined in the last 16 by the doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy-Chirag Shetty and Ashwini Ponnappa-N Sikki Reddy, who also won comfortably.
Seeded eight, Srikanth lost to 11-21 21-15 12-21 in a match where he looked off colour from the beginning. His match lasted exactly an hour as the player from Ireland came back strongly after losing the second game against the Indian.
Sindhu was relatively untroubled in a 21-11, 21-17 win against Malaysia’s Soniia Cheah. The sixth-seeded pair of Rankireddy and Shetty were even more dominant in a 21-7, 21-10 win against Nikhar Garg and Aniruddha Mayekar.
Ponnappa and Sikki defeated Thailand’s Benyapa Aimsaard and Nuntakarn Aimsaard 21-14 21-12 in a women’s doubles match that lasted 30 minutes.
Former Commonwealth Games gold medallist Kashyap went down in straight games to top-seeded Japanese Momota 13-21 20-22 in 42 minutes.
