The Indian men’s doubles duo of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty fought hard to advance to the final, but it was curtains for HS Prannoy in the men’s singles semi-finals of the Indonesia Open World Tour Super 1000 event here on Saturday.
The Commonwealth Games gold medallist duo, seeded seventh, overcame a game deficit to beat the unseeded pair of Min Hyuk Kang and Seung Jae Seo of Korea 17-21, 21-19, 21-18 to seal their maiden Super-1000 final berth.
The win also extended Satwik and Chirag’s overall head-to-head record over Kang and Seo to 3-2.
World No. 6 Satwik and Chirag will face Malaysia’s Aaron Chia and Wooi Yik Soh on Sunday. The second seeds beat the Indonesian pair of Pramudya Kusumawardana and Yeremia Erich Yoche Yacob Rambitan 12-21, 23-21, 21-13 in the other semi-final.
“We feel really good the way we played today. They made a comeback in the third game but we stuck till the end and I am happy that we didn’t run away from our tactics. We stuck to it till the very end. First time we are in a Super 1000 final and so it feels good,” Chirag said after the win.
“They (Koreans) too have a really strong defence, so it was sort of a attack vs defence game. You just can’t blindly attack them. We were mixing it up.”
Asked about Sunday’s final: Satwik responded: “It’s a new day, get back and recover our body first. I was not feeling 100 per cent in the first game. Slowly I got my rhythm in the second game.”
However, Prannoy failed to rise to the occasion against top seed Viktor Axelsen of Denmark, going down 15-21, 15-21.
Prannoy played the catch up game from the onset. He showed sparks in between riding on his cross court smashes but Axelsen’s drop shots helped him to take the lead.
