India’s campaign at the Sudirman Cup ended after they went down 0-3 against top seed and 10-time champions China in the quarterfinals of the mixed team championship today.
It was always going to be an uphill task for the ninth seeded Indian team to breach the Chinese wall and though the mixed doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy put up a gritty show to challenge the World No. 2 pair of Lu Kai and Huang Yaqiong, they ultimately went down.
The experienced Chinese combination had the last laugh as they beat Ashwini and Satwiksairaj 16-21 21-13 21-16 in the first match that lasted an hour and three minutes.
K Srikanth was then handed the enormous task of taming the Olympic champion Chen Long. In the 48-minute men’s singles match, Srikanth showed some spark but never really came close to threatening the supremacy of the Chinese.
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 Sen 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 the winner of the other quarterfinal between Japan and Malaysia.