It was a neck to neck battle between Pusarla Sindhu of India and Nozomi Okuhara of Japan in the Women’s Singles final of World Badminton Championship at Scotland today . The Indian shuttle Queen, who has been the favourite in this championship, put up her best performance, winning the longest rally of 73 shots played against her opponent in the second game at 21-20 to win that crucial point and equalise the set score at 1-1 after losing the first game.
Pusarla Sindhu
Down 2-5 in the decider, Sindhu battled aggressively with fast paced rallies, to level the scores at 5-5. Thereafter it was a ding dong battle till 9-9, but Sindhu took the much required lead at 11-9 during the break to regain her confidence. However, at this stage Nozomi equaled the score at 11-11.
The Umpire was so strict that she didn’t allow both the players to take towel break. This clearly indicated that bot the players were tired with long rallies. At one stage, Sidhu asked for review and took little more time to return to table , which resulted in Umpire showing her Yellow card, for misbehavior. Between 11 and 17, it was anybody’s match and it gave an impression that the player with better fitness would win the finals.
At this stage, when it was battle of nerves, Nozomi tried to release the tension by maintaining light smile on her face, while Sindhu looked tense. Sindhu had the advantage of leading 19-17, but Nozomi attacked brilliantly picking up the right opportunity to attack on Sindhu’s backhand to take 2 points successively to equal the scores once again. It was anybody’s match at this stage, but Sindhu was excited to finish early and lost one point, but quickly leveled the scores at 20-20.
Luck favoured Nozomi at this stage, who won next two points during those exciting rallies, who won the game at 22-20 to win the first Gold medal in World badminton Championship. So, India gained two medals, a silver for Sindhu and bronze for Saina in this tournament.