All England Championships: Jonatan Christie halts Lakshya Sen in semis, India’s wait for title goes on

Birmingham, March 16

Another impressive week ended with a creditable semifinals finish for star shuttler Lakshya Sen after he stumbled to a three-game loss to Indonesia’s Jonatan Christie at the All England Championships here today, prolonging India’s wait for the coveted trophy.

In a game of fine margins, the 22-year-old, who had finished runner-up in the 2022 edition, was marginally short as he slipped to a 21-12 10-21 15-21 defeat to world No. 9 Christie, the 2018 Asian Games gold medallist.

Christie will now face fellow Indonesian Anthony Sinisuka Ginting in tomorrow’s final.

“I am pretty disappointed with the result but, overall, the way I played, surely, I have the level to be there and win the big tournaments,” Sen said after the match.

Sen, who reached the semifinals of the French Open Super 750 the previous week, has been on court for 491 minutes playing some nerve-racking badminton in the last 11 days and, perhaps, those gruelling three-setters might have taken their toll on him as he ran out of steam in the semis. “All the matches that I played were long so I could feel it in the recovery, in the next day match preparation. All of them were required to win for that particular day,” Sen said.

Though he failed to go the distance, the last two weeks have been memorable for Sen, who was looking down and out after a series of first-round exits, including losses at the Malaysia Super 1000 and India Open Super 750 this season. The back-to-back semifinals finishes are likely to lock his Paris berth when the BWF rankings are published by April-end.

All England, the oldest badminton tournament in the world, has its own aura and Sen managed to beat fourth-seeded Dane Anders Antonsen and Malaysia’s world No. 10 Lee Zii Jia en route the semifinals. — PTI

Krishna-Pratheek out of Orleans Masters

Orleans (France): Indian pair Krishna Prasad Garaga and Sai Pratheek K suffered a straight-game loss in the men’s doubles quarterfinals to bow out of the Orleans Masters badminton tournament here. The world No. 70 pair lost 17-21 16-21 in 40 minutes to the seventh-seeded Danish combination of Andreas Sondergaard and Jesper Toft, ranked 46th in the BWF charts, on Friday night. It ended India’s campaign at the Super 300 event. The Indian pair was the only one from the country to reach the last-eight.