India’s tournament at the Sudirman Cup ended after they lost to the top seeded 10-time champions China in the quarterfinals of the mixed team championship on Friday with a loss of 0-3.
The challenging mixed doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy put up a upbeat show to challenge the World No. 2 pair of Lu Kai and Huang Yaqiong, ultimately they lost it.
The match lasted an hour and three minutes which was almost on equal games but finally China pulled the strings and won the game with 16-21 21-13 21-16 in the first match.
Kidambi Srikanth was then given the enormous task of defeating the Olympic champion Chen Long. In the 48-minute men’s singles match, Srikanth tried hard to beat him but never really came close to threatening the supremacy of the Chinese.
Ultimately the Chinese dominated the game with a score of 16-21 17-21 and India sliped to 0-2 deficit in the five-match rubber.
Young pair of Satwiksairaj and Chirag Shetty then faced Fu Haifeng and Zhang Nan in the mixed doubles match and had a easy loss of 9-21 11-21 within half an hour as China registered a 3-0 win over India.
The next two matches singles, which PV Sindhu was suppose to play, and women’s doubles – became unnecessary.
India had qualified for the knockout stage only once in 2011 but even then it was the Chinese who had ended their campaign with a 3-1 win.
China, which lost only one of their 10 matches in the ground stage, played out another superb performance to destroy the Indian shuttlers and now will face the winner of the other quarterfinal between Japan and Malaysia.
