Lakshya Sen, an excellent shuttler from India, continued his impressive run on Thursday by defeating Koki Watanabe, a local favourite, in straight games to advance to the semifinals of the Japan Open Super 750 badminton tournament in Tokyo. Lakshya, the 2022 Commonwealth Champion, defeated Watanabe in a straight-set victory with a smashing score of 21-15, 21-19, to advance to his third straight semifinal after victories in Canada and the US. Sen, who earlier this month won the Canada Open Super 500, went off to a quick 5-3 lead before narrowing to 11-7 at the half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Indian easily outwitted the Japanese, and with two cross-court returns on both sides of the court, he soon ended the first game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After switching sides, Watanabe attempted to add some vigour to the exchanges, but Sen appeared to be in control and increased the score to 3-2 with a magnificent cross-court drop. Sen’s backhand landed in the net at the end of a 42-shot rally, giving Watanabe a 5-3 advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sen, who was down 7-14, mounted a comeback by luring his opponent to the basket and effectively using drop shots. At 18-17, he swiftly changed the tide with a cross-court smash. With two returns on his opponent’s backhand, Sen earned one match point before making another accurate return at the backhand line to beat his Japanese opponent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Olympic champion Chinese Taipeian duo of Lee Yang and Wang Chi-Lan defeated the in-form Indian men’s doubles team of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty 15-21 25-23 16-21 in the meantime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later on in the day, Indian HS Prannoy, the eighth seed, will play Olympic and World badminton champion Viktor Axelsen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand of India’s women’s doubles team withdrew after dropping a close match to Nami Matsuyama and Chiharu Shida of Japan. Indian shuttlers were defeated 23-21, 21-19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen, who was down 7-14, mounted a comeback by luring his opponent to the basket and effectively using drop shots. At 18-17, he swiftly changed the tide with a cross-court smash. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":482529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6],"tags":[156714,159684,131177,156715,159756],"yst_prominent_words":[64043,36148,32865,86341,13088,3887,4556,9115,20817,52977,62780,86178,12740],"ppma_author":[140543],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/d2r2ijn7njrktv.cloudfront.net\/apnlive\/uploads\/2023\/07\/28143341\/ezgif-5-dbcf99cb01-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":140543,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"apnnewsdesk","display_name":"APN Live","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/478eacb893eda88aa6ed8d99b005bf58?s=96&r=g"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482527"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=482527"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=482527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}