BASEL: PV Sindhu didn’t break much sweat and posted an easy victory in her opening match at the BWF World Championships here on Wednesday. Later, Saina Nehwal also had it easy against Soraya de Visch Eijbergen of Netherlands. Saina, who had received a bye in the opening round, won 21-10, 21-11 in 33 minutes.
Sindhu, who had reached the finals of Indonesia Open last month, looked in good touch as she controlled the rallies and outsmarted Chinese Taipei’s Pai Yu Po 21-14, 21-14 in a 43-minute contest.
In the men’s singles, seventh seed Kidambi Srikanth had to dig deep to advance. He came from a game down to beat Misha Zilberman of Israel 13-21, 21-13, 21-16.
Fifth seeded Sindhu, who received a bye in the opening round, will face USA’s Beiwen Zhang in the pre-quarterfinals. Zhang beat Australia’s Chen Hsuan-Yu 21-14, 21-13. Sindhu had lost to Zhang at the India Open finals last year. In the first game, Sindhu moved ahead from 5-5 to slowly create a gap and entered the interval with a 11-7 lead. After the break, Sindhu continued to surge and grabbed six game points when Pai made an error in judgement at the backline. The Indian sealed it with a cross court return.
Sindhu zoomed to a 6-1 lead in the second game before Pai started constructing the rallies and narrowed the deficit to 5-7. Sindhu’s unforced errors also made life easy for the Taiwanese girl, who showed some great skills and managed to enter the interval with a 11-10 lead after Sindhu found the net.
The Indian, however, changed gears after the break, dishing out some good-looking strokes to eventually enter match point at 20-14 when her rival missed a shuttle at the backline.The Indian pairing of Jakkapudi Meghana and Poorvisha S Ram lost 8-21, 18-21 to Shiho Tanaka and Koharu Yonemoto of Japan in the women’s doubles section.