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HS Prannoy, India's lone entrant in the season-ending 2022 HSBC BWF World Tour Finals, has been drawn in Group A alongside top seed and World No. 1 Viktor Axelsen of Denmark. The other two players to make up this men's singles group are World No. 14 Kodai Naraoka of Japan and World No. 17 Lu Guang Zu of China.
Group B, on the other hand, will be led by second-seed and fourth-ranked Chou Tien Chen of Chinese Taipei. The others competing in the same group are World No. 5 Jonatan Christie and World No. 7 Anthony Sinisuka Ginting, both of Indonesia, apart from World No. 3 Loh Kean Yew of Singapore.
The draw was held on Monday ahead of the BWF World Tour Finals, which will get underway in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 7. The prestigious year-ending tournament was originally scheduled to be held in Guangzhou, China, between December 14-18 but had to be shifted due to the current pandemic situation.
Along with World No. 12 HS Prannoy, reigning Commonwealth Games women's singles gold medalist PV Sindhu also qualified for the event. But the former champion had to pull out in order to fully recover from an ankle injury she sustained in Birmingham.
HS Prannoy will make his first appearance at the year-ending championships
HS Prannoy, a Pullela Gopichand protégé, will be making his maiden appearance at the gala year-ending championships, where only the top eight players of the season from each category qualify.
The third seed, however, has a tough task ahead of him if he wants to make it out of his group and qualify for the semifinals of the tournament. He trails Axelsen 1-5 in their head-to-head, although the Keralite won their most recent encounter at the 2021 Indonesia Masters.
Prannoy lost his only showdowns with Kodai Naraoka and Lu Guang Zu in tight three-game duels at the Singapore Open and the French Open, respectively, earlier this year.
The Indian No. 3 men's singles shuttler can, however, draw confidence from his consistent performances this year that saw him reach the quarterfinals of the BWF World Championships for the first time. He was also pivotal to India's historic Thomas Cup success and made the final of the Swiss Open.
