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Internet Desk: India crashes out of the Sudirman Cup after going down 0-3 to top seeded China who is a 10 time champion of this tournament.
India’s campaign came to an end in the quarter-finals of the mixed team championship.
India’s mixed doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy faced a major difficult job to when they faced the World No. 2 pair of Lu Kai and Huang Yaqiong and ultimately went down fighting the match.
The Chinese pair defeated the Indian duo Ashwini and Satwiksairaj 16-21, 21-13, 21-16. The match lasted for an hour and thirty minutes.
After the defeat a massive task was put on the shoulder of K Srikanth who had to defeat Olympic champion Chen Long. Although Srikanth played well but in the end he too had to bow down to the champ.
In the end, it was a 16-21, 17-21 defeat against Long that saw India slip to a 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 capitulated 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 inconsequential.
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 round-robin stage, dished out another superb performance to outwit the Indian shuttlers and will face Japan in the semi-finals.