Dey accounted for the third seed Sai Praneeth, so he is playing with a lot of courage and confidence and would not go away without a fight. Dey makes it 14-16
Good morning and welcome to the Sportskeeda liveblog of the 2017 Senior National Badminton Championships semi-finals. Second seed HS Prannoy takes on giant-killer Subhankar Dey for a place in the summit clash.
The two have met just once in international tournaments - at the 2014 Tata Open India International Challenge. Prannoy edged Dey in three games in that match.
Both are now at career-high world rankings. Prannoy is 11th in the world while Dey is 67th. The latter caused a huge upset yesterday in the quarter-finals when he held his nerves to oust the third seed and former champion, B Sai Praneeth in three gruelling games.
Not just that, Dey even sent the sixth seeded Daniel Farid packing from the tournament in the round before that. He is thus coming into this match with a lot of confidence and has nothing to lose.
He is expected to give the US Open champion a tough fight. Prannoy was brilliant in his quarter-final against former champion, Parupalli Kashyap and ground out a win in a tight two-game match. But he did commit a few unforced errors in his pre-quarter-final which led to him conceding a game to Chirag Sen.
He needs to be careful not to repeat that for Dey won't let go of such chances.
Later in the day, Saina Nehwal, PV Sindhu and Srikanth Kidambi will all be in action.