The No 5 seed Sindhu struggled for an hour and six minutes to subdue her Chinese opponent He Bingjiao 21-10,17-21,21-16, to barge into the final of the $600,000 event.
Exactly three weeks after the passage of one of the greatest finals in the history of world badminton, lovers of the sport will get another opportunity to witness an encore between the two protagonists who shed blood, toil, tears and sweat on the green synthetic courts laid in Glasgow’s Emirates Arena.
India’s willowy PV Sindhu, who was deprived of the World Championship gold medal by Japan’s Nozomi Okuhara after a titanic 110-minute David versus Goliath battle that has become the stuff of legend, qualified on Saturday to match wits again with Okuhara for the women’s singles title of the 2017 Korea Open Superseries badminton championships.
The No 5 seed Sindhu struggled for an hour and six minutes to subdue her Chinese opponent He Bingjiao 21-10,17-21,21-16, to barge into the final of the $600,000 event.
The recently crowned world champion had made the grade by extending her hegemony over compatriot and No 2 seed Akane Yamaguchi with a relatively facile 21-17,21-18 win that came in 38 minutes.
It must have rankled with the 22-year-old Sindhu that Bingjiao, two years her junior, had gone into their semi-final meeting with a 5-3 advantage in head-to-head meetings. The two had traded wins alternately on the last six occasions that they had met, after the Chinese player had opened out an initial 2-0 lead.
Their most recent clash at the Badminton Asia Championships in April this year, had been desperately close, ending in a 15-21,21-14,24-22 triumph for the younger player.
At Seoul’s SK Handball Stadium, which had attracted only a handful of spectators on Saturday following the quarter-final eclipse of their darlings Son Wan Ho and Sung Ji Hyun, Sindhu started in storming fashion, and was a game up before her opponent could settle into the match.
Massive leads of 5-0,9-1,13-4 and 18-7 made it amply clear that the Indian was in an implacable mood after her off-colour performance against Japan’s Minatsu Mitani the previous day.
When Sindhu leaped out into a 9-3 lead in the second game, it appeared that the writing was on the wall.
