Treesa & Gaytri survive a scare

Top seeds and defending champions were expected to breeze through the opening rounds of the Syed Modi India international 2025 badminton. Instead, the Indian pair was stretched and scared before prevailing 19-21, 22-20, 21-9 in its tournament opener here on Tuesday.

As one of the few top Indians in action on a day otherwise dominated by qualification matches, the focus was firmly on Treesa and Gayatri but the much lower-ranked Malaysians Cheng Su Hui and Tan Zhing Yi made them work for every point in the first two games. Ranked 80th in the world to Treesa and Gaytri’s 14, the Malaysians raced to a 6-1 lead in the opening game before the Indians fought back to make it 12-12 but conceded the game with errors at the net.

The Indians decided to play a lot more attacking and reaped its reward thereafter despite wasting two game points to take the match into the decider and then dominated their tired opponents to close it out.

The other top Indian pairs had easy outings against fellow Indians. While second-seeded men’s team of Pruthvi Krishnamurthy Roy and Sai Pratheek beat Swarnaraj Bora and Nibir Ranjan 21-8, 21-17 in less than half-an-hour, the fifth-ranked pair of Hariharan Amsakarunan and M.R. Arjun beat Ayush Makhija and Sujey Tamboli 21-11, 21-13.

Singles main draw action will begin on Wednesday with H.S. Prannoy and K. Srikanth taking on fellow Indians Shaswat Dalal and Kavin Thangam respectively, top-seeded Unnati Hooda up against Akarshi Kashyap and Nozumi Okuhara facing qualifier Adita Rao.