Defending champion Chen Long was ousted in the second round of the badminton All England Championships by Chinese teammate Xue Song 21-19, 21-17 on Thursday.
For the second straight day, the last singles match in the arena produced an eye-opener. Second-ranked Lee Chong Wei, a three-time champion, lost in straight sets late on Wednesday, followed by top-ranked Chen, who succumbed to a teammate familiar with his style.
Xue, who lost their only previous meeting on tour in the first round at the same event last year, controlled the early stages, letting Chen lead only briefly before closing the first game on his first game point.
Photo: Chuo Chia-ping, Taipei Times
Chen dictated more in the second, but from 13-11 ahead, the world champion had to rally to tie Xue on 17. Xue won the final four points and, at 30, was the lowest-ranked player in the quarter-finals.
The result meant Chen has not won in his past four tournaments, and the only former champion left in the men’s field was Lin Dan, who won the last of his five titles in 2012.
Lin beat Sho Sasaki of Japan 20-22, 21-6, 21-8 for the second time in two weeks, having also won in the German Open quarter-finals.
Lin set up a quarter-final with third-seeded Jan Jorgensen, the Dane who knocked him out in the quarter-finals of the world championships last year. That was Jorgensen’s third win over Lin in 10 matches.
The other quarters feature Superseries Finals winner Kento Momota of Japan against Tian Houwei of China; Marc Zwiebler of Germany against fellow unseeded player Hans-Kristian Vittinghus of Denmark; and Xue versus Viktor Axelsen of Denmark.
In the women’s singles, seven of the top eight earned their seeded place in the quarter-finals, all enjoying straight-sets wins.
Only No. 5 Sung Ji-hyun of South Korea dropped out, beaten by Tai Tzu-ying of Taiwan 21-13, 23-21. Tai’s reward was a matchup with second-ranked Saina Nehwal, against whom Tai has a 6-5 win-loss record, winning the past four.
Top-ranked Carolina Marin of Spain will have to beat fourth-ranked Ratchanok Intanon of Thailand for the first time in five matches to extend her title defense into the semi-finals.
Chinese teammates Li Xuerui and Wang Shixian, both former champions, face each other and the last semi sees 2009 winner Wang Yihan of China against Nozomi Okuhara, the Japanese who beat Wang in the final of the Superseries Finals last year.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS