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Former Indian national champion Rituparna Das continues her rampage at the YONEX Belgian International 2018 as she upset the fifth seed Soraya De Visch Eijbergen to enter the final on Friday. The unseeded Indian needed 52 minutes to come back from a game down and beat the World No. 67 by a 21-23, 21-13, 21-7 scoreline in the semi-finals of this International Challenge tournament in Leuven, Belgium.
However, the Indian contingent failed to have double delight as the men’s singles fifth seed Subhankar Dey could not win his semi-final match. Dey went down to the seventh seeded Victor Svendsen 19-21, 20-22 in a tight match that lasted 44 minutes.
Das lost a chunk of the 2018 season due to a multitude of injuries. The Haldia-born shuttler, who trains at the Pullela Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad, has recently been clawing her way back to the top tier of the sport.
The World No. 103 made it to the quarter-finals of the Russian Open and the Vietnam Open before coming to this tournament. Throughout this week, she has been putting up some confidence-boosting performances, that saw her accounting for the second seed, seventh seed and now the fifth seed.
Das will hope to do the same when she takes on World No. 187 Lin Ying Chun of Chinese Taipei in the summit clash.
Indian challenge ends in South Australian International
In the early hours of Saturday, the Indian challenge came to an end at the South Australian International, an International Challenge event going on in Adelaide. Both the Indian mixed doubles pairs, who reached the quarter-finals, bowed out.
Utkarsh Arora and Karishma Wadkar squandered a one-game lead to surrender 21-19, 14-21, 11-21 to the Singapore pair of Bimo Adi Prakoso and Yujia Jin. Second seeds Saurabh Sharma and Anoushka Parikh were knocked out 13-21, 17-21 by Hee Yong Kai Terry and Putri Sari Dewi Citra of Singapore.
