India’s Kidambi Srikanth succeeded in claiming his fourth Superseries title of the year from five entries into the finals of the French Open 2017.
The fourth-ranked ranked Srikanth’s comfortable 21-14, 21-13 triumph on Sunday over the 40
th-ranked Japanese player Kenta Nishimoto, who had fought his way to the final from the qualifying rounds, turned out to be a near-mirror image of the 21-12, 21-11 win that the Indian had notched in the Singapore Open in April this year.
Meanwhile, in the other finals that were decided at the Stade Pierre de Coubertin on 29
th Oct, the World’s No 1 female player and top seed, Tai Tzu Ying, scored a facile 21-4, 21-16 win over Japanese Akane Yamaguchi, the No 5 seed.
There was a maiden Superseries title for the recently formed Indonesian pairing of Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu (Polii played with Krishinda Maheswari until recently), as they notched a comfortable 21-17, 21-15 triumph over South Korea’s Lee So Hee and Shin Seung Chan, another new combination (Lee had won the 2017 All England title Premier with Chang Ye Na).
The Indonesians simply combined better than the Koreans in the long-drawn 54-minute encounter, the longest on the day of the finals.
The fourth-seeded Indonesians have been world champions in 2013 and 2017, and also won the Olympic gold in Rio in 2016.
Natsir has had a much longer and illustrious career, winning the 2005 and 2007 world titles with the since-retired Nova Widianto, and has also been a silver medalist with Widiyanto at Beijing in 2008.
The concluding match on the card, the men’s doubles, was one in which the seventh-seeded Chinese Taipei combination of Lee Jhe-huei and Lee Yang scored over the Danish pairing of Carsten Mogensen and Mathias Boe, silver medalists at the 2012 London Olympics, by a 21-19, 23-21 verdict.
