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For the second year in a row, the rising Indian men’s doubles pair of Krishna Prasad Garaga and Dhruv Kapila finished as the U-19 runners-up at the Yonex Dutch Junior 2018 held in Haarlem, Netherlands on Sunday. The duo, seeded third at this Junior International Grand Prix tournament, went down fighting 20-22, 16-21 in a tight final to the unseeded Chinese combine of Weikeng Liang and Shang Yichen in 36 minutes.
Garaga and Kapila were looking to erase the setback they had last year at this event and go one better this time. In 2017 they had succumbed to a 13-21, 19-21 defeat at the hands of Chinese Taipei’s Su Li Wei and Ye Hong Wei as the top seeded team.
But a year later, they had to be content with the silver medal once again, despite putting up a fabulous performance earlier in the day in the semi-finals, where they got the better of Japan’s Hiroki Midorikawa and Hiroki Nakayama 21-16, 21-8.
Garaga and Kapila, both of whom are placed at eighth in the junior world rankings, will now set their sights at the German Junior Open to be held in Berlin this week.
The youngsters have impressed with their skills in the past few months and have been touted as India’s next best hope in men’s doubles for quite some time. Other than the Dutch Junior Open, they also made it to the quarter-finals of the Asia Junior Championships and the pre-quarter-finals of the World Junior Championships last year.
Kapila and Garaga were the only Indians to reach the semi-finals of the Dutch Junior this year. Vishnu Vardhan Goud Panjala and Srikrishna Sai Kumar Podile bowed out in the quarter-finals of the men’s doubles.
In singles, Pune girl Purva Barve was the only Indian to enter the quarter-finals. The 11th seed stunned the seventh seeded Reka Madarasz 21-15, 13-21, 21-14 in the pre-quarter-finals only to lose 13-21, 7-21 to the fourth seed Chasinee Korepap in the next round.
