London, Mar 15 Lakshya Sen produced a stirring fightback to pack off the red-hot Anders Antonsen, the Danish fourth seed, in three games to be the only Indian left standing at the All England Open badminton championships.Lakshya trailed 2-8 and then 6-12 in the decider, but stormed back after the final change of ends to register a massive win. He will next face Lee Zii Jia, a former champion here, on Friday.
An error-prone PV Sindhu suffered a straight-game defeat to her nemesis An Se Young of Korea in the women’s singles second round at the All England badminton Championships here on Thursday.
Sindhu, a double Olympic medallist, seemed to be in good touch as she fought hard against the world No. 1 Korean but failed to curb her mistakes as she slipped to a 19-21, 11-21 loss in their 42-minute clash.
It was the Indian’s seventh successive loss to the indomitable An Se Young, who had become the first Korean woman singles player to win the World Championships last year.
The Indian tried to attack but her 22-year-old opponent looked in a different league as she varied the pace of the rallies and used her repertoire of strokes well to come up trumps. For Sindhu, things went downhill after the break in the second game as errors kept piling up.
There was disappointed later on for world No 1 Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, who came into the event after winning the French Open title last week. They had defeated the tricky pairing of Indonesian legends
Mohammad Ahsan and Hendra Setiawan in straight games on Wednesday. But taking on another Indonesian pair in Muhammad Shohibul Fikri and Bagas Maulana, who were All England badminton open champions in 2022, the Indians bowed out in straight games.
Tanisha Crasto and Ashwini Ponnappa also went out in the round of 16, after taking the opening game against Zhang and Zheng of China 11-21 21-11 21-11.
Sen, former runner-up who is unseeded at Birmingham this year. He beat young Dane leftie Magnus Johannesen, 21-14, 21-14 in an easy Round 1 clash to end up as the only Indian in Round 2 of men’s singles.