The star Indian pairing of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty on Thursday won their second round match in straight games to book a place in the quarter-finals of the China Masters Super 750 tournament going on in Shenzhen. (More Badminton News)
The Indian duo reached the quarter-finals of the men's doubles division with a 21-19 21-15 win over Danish pair of Rasmus Kjaer and Frederik Soggard.
This is the first tournament of the Satwik-Chirag pair since the Paris Olympics in August this year where the duo's medal dreams were extinguished in the quarter-finals.
In their second round match the Danish duo of Kjaer and Soggard took an early lead of 5-1 but the Indians bounced back soon to level scores in the opening game. It was a neck-and-neck battle after that but the Indians emerged triumphant to take the opening game 21-19.
The second game saw the Indian pair get the better of their Danish opponents early on but after that another close battle was seen. Satwik-Chirag then took the lead in the middle of the second game and never looked back. Ultimately, the match went to the Indians 21-19, 21-15.
The challenge in the quarter-finals is set to get tougher for the sixth-seeded Indian pairing. Satwik and Chirag will now face the second-seeded Danish combination of Kim Astrup and Anders Skaarup Rasmussen in the last eight encounter.
Apart from Satwik-Chirag, Lakshya Sen too advanced to the quarter-finals while other Indian challengers, including two-time Olympic medallist PV Sindhu, lost.
