Sindhu, Prannoy, Srikanth advance

Tokyo, Sept. 11: Ace Indian shuttler P. V. Sindhu had to toil hard even as Kidambi Srikanth and H. S. Prannoy scored easy victories to progress to the second round of their respective events at the Japan Open, on Tuesday.

Third seed Sindhu had to sweat it out for 53 minutes before prevailing 21- 17, 721, 21- 13 over unseeded local girl Sayaka Takahashi in her women’s singles opening round.

Sindhu will next play Chinese Fangjie Gao, who defeated the other Indian in fray Jakka Vaishnavi Reddy 21- 10, 21- 8.

Having finished secondbest yet again with a historic silver in the Asian Games, Olympic medallist Sindhu would be desperate to break the final jinx here.

Sindhu has been outstanding with silver medals in all the major events this year — the Commonwealth Games, the World Championship and the Asian Games but the gold has been eluding the Indian for a while now.

In men’s singles, Prannoy defeated current Asian Games gold medallist Jonathan Christie of Indonesia 21- 18, 21- 17 while Srikanth got the better of Chinese Yuxiang Huang 2113, 21- 15 in another first round match.

While Prannoy will be up against Anthony Sinisuka Ginting of Indonesia in the second round, Srikanth will take on Vincent Wong Wing Ki of Hong Kong.

However, it was curtains for another Indian, Sameer Verma, who fought hard before going down 18- 21, 2220, 10- 21 in another men’s singles opening round encounter.

Mixed doubles pair of Ranikireddy and Ponappa were shown the door by second seeds Yilyu Wang and Dongping Huang of China 13- 21 17- 21, while Pranaav Chopra and Sikki Reddy stormed into the second round with a 21- 9 21- 6 victory over Mathew Fogarty and Isabel Zhong.

— PTI