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Ace Indian shuttler Kidambi Srikanth eased his way to a bronze medal with a straight sets win over Singapore's Teh Jia Heng in the men's singles badminton at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham on Sunday.
The experienced Indian barely broke a sweat, overcoming his lower-ranked and young opponent 21-5, 21-18 in the bronze medal match.
Meanwhile, young Indian duo of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand also won a bronze medal with a 2-0 win over Australia’s Chen Hsuan-yu and Gronya Somerville in the women's doubles final.
Srikanth, thus, made amends for his semi-final loss earlier in the day with the bronze medal win against Jia Heng, who gave his all despite being under some visible discomfort.
The 29-year-old had won a silver in the mixed doubles team event in Birmingham a few days back. He also has a mixed team event gold and a singles silver respectively from the 2018 edition of Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast.
It could have been an all-Indian men's final with countrymate Lakshya Sen winning his semi-final match, however, Srikanth squandered a first game advantage to lose to lower-ranked Tze Yong Ng of Malaysia 21-13, 19-21, 21-10 in the other singles semi-final at Birmingham.
Maiden CWG Bronze for Treesa-Gayatri Pair
The Indian women's doubles pairing of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand beat Australia’s Chen Hsuan-yu and Gronya Somerville to bag bronze in Birmingham.
The two 19-year-old's have now won a medal in their debut CWG campaign. It was not the easiest of affairs as the young Indian duo had to toil hard to register a 21-15, 21-18 win against the experinced Australian pair.
Treesa and Gayatri had earlier lost to the seasoned Malaysian pair of Thinnah Muralitharan and Pearly Koon Le Tan in the semi-finals in straight games.
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