Chirag-Satwik take men’s doubles badminton gold

BIRMINGHAM, Aug 8: India’s star doubles pair of Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy won the country’s third gold from the badminton court with a straight game victory over England’s Ben Lane and Sean Mendy at the Commonwealth Games.
The Indian duo won the match 21-15, 21-13. The silver for the pair came in team championship.
India thus finished a fantastic badminton campaign with three gold, one silver and two bronze.
Also, world championships silver medallist Kidambi Srikanth and the young women’s doubles pair of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand signed off with bronze medals in the badminton competition of the Commonwealth Games here late on Sunday.
Srikanth, a former world number one, made amends for his semi-final loss as he prevailed over Singapore’s world number 87 Jia Heng Teh 21-15 21-18 to claim a bronze medal to go with the silver that he had won four years ago in Gold Coast.
In the following bronze medal playoff, Treesa and Gayatri registered a 21-15 21-18 win over world number 159 Australian pair of Wendy Hsuan-Yu Chen and Gronya Somerville to finish third on the podium in their first major event together as a combination.
It could have been an all-Indian men’s singles final but an error-prone Srikanth squandered a first game advantage to lose to lower-ranked Tze Yong Ng 21-13, 19-21, 21-10 in the semifinals.
The Indian women’s doubles pairing of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand had earlier suffered a loss to the seasoned Malaysian combination of Thinnah Muralitharan and Pearly Koon Le Tan in the semifinals in straight games. (PTI)