Guangzhou: Thursday turned out be a big day for India at the BWF World Championships with three of its star players - Saina Nehwal, Parupalli Kashyap and PV Sindhu - entered the quarter-finals.
While Saina won her pre-quarters outing against 15th seed Thai Porntip Buranaprasertsuk 18-21, 21-16, 21-14 in 52 minutes, Kashyap and Sindhu registered big upsets, beating their sixth and second seed opponents respectively.
Kashyap beat Hong Kong's Yun Hu 21-13, 21-16 in 37 minutes, while Sindhu outclassed the defending champion Yihan Wang of China 21-18, 23-21 in 55 minutes.
With this win, Saina also kept her all-win record against Buranaprasertsuk intact, having beaten her in their five previous encounters before Thursday. Saina's most recent win against Buranaprasertsuk came last year during the Thailand Open.
Buranaprasertsuk started off strongly on Thursday and surprised the Indian with better command over smash winners, sending down 11 of them in the first game. But Saina regained her composure pretty quickly and roared back in the second game with nine of her trademark smash winners.
She kept up the pressure in the deciding game as well to emerge triumphant after the initial scare.
Sindhu had a neck-and-neck tussle with her more fancied opponent, seeded second in the tournament, till 8-8 before the Indian surged ahead to open a 12-9 lead. But the higher-ranked Chinese was not the one to give it up so easily and it was again a closely-contested affair till 16-16.
But thereafter Sindhu, seeded 10th, won two consecutive points, which she followed up by widening the margin to eventually win the first game 21-18.
The second game started on equal footing and went on till 6-6 before Sindhu managed to take a huge 13-7 lead. Continuing to build on the initial advantage, the girl from Hyderabad kept on extending the gap and made it 20-17.
But the Chinese dug deep into her vast experience to save as many as three match points to make it 20-20 and then took it a step further by bagging another point to take an upper hand on 21-20.
Sindhu, however, maintained her composure to save the match point before going for the final kill. The young Indian now runs into world number eight Shixian Wang of China.
Kashyap hit 16 clear winners as compared to just nine by his opponent from Hong Kong.
Yun Hu completely failed to live up to the expectations and was far from his best. Hu, looking totally off-colour, let the Indian dominate throughout the match.
Kashyap took an upper hand by opening up a 14-7 lead in the first game itself, before wrapping it up 21-13.
The second game also saw Hu suffering a similar fate as Kashyap once again made it 14-7. But Hu pocketed four consecutive points to reduce the gap to 11-14 and then levelled 15-15 before running out steam to hand Kashyap a comfortable victory in the end.
Kashyap will meet world number three Pengyu Du in the last eight stage.
(With inputs from agencies)
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