Satok Sairaj Rankireddy And Chirag Shetty The top-seeded and world No. 1 duo of South Korea’s Kim Won-ho and Seo Seung-jae reached the final in straight games on Saturday in the men’s doubles final of the Singapore Open Super 750 tournament. The fourth-seeded Indian pair defeated the reigning world champions 21-19, 21-18 in a semi-final that lasted 52 minutes. Satuk and Chirag will now face the winner of the second semi-final between Indonesia’s third-seeded pair of Fajr Alfian and Mohammad Shoahib Fikri and China’s fifth-seeded pair of Liang Wei Kang and Chang Wang in Sunday’s final. However, Dhruv Kapila and Tanisha Christo faced disappointment in mixed doubles. The Indian duo lost 16-21, 21-17, 13-21 to Japan’s Yuchi Shimugami and Sayaka Hobara in the semi-finals. The men’s doubles competition was fiercely contested from the start. The Korean pair led 13-11 at the break midway through the opening game, but Satok and Chirag stayed in touch and took the match 21-19. The Indians then found themselves behind in the second game, trailing 11-14 at one stage. But they recovered again, winning key points in the closing stages to seal a straight games victory and record their first win over the Korean pair. After the match, Chirag said that the pair remained confident even after falling behind. “Even when we were down, we supported each other and stuck with each other and eventually we knew they would break at some point and if we stuck to our plans, we knew it would work. We had that belief and it worked out well for us,” Chirag said. Stouk explained the approach that helped him turn the match. “Just keep moving to the net, I felt they weren’t in a comfortable position to defend. It’s always a slow start for us, we need to adjust a little bit.” Chirag also said that the duo is constantly improving. “I think we’re in the right direction and improvement is an ongoing process, you’re never going to be perfect, there’s always room for improvement and we keep pushing ourselves and we think we’re on the right track.” The win was the first for Satok and Chirag against the world No. 1 Korean combination, although they had come close in previous meetings. “We actually only played them twice, once in the semifinals of the India Open and Malaysia Open last year and the China final, it was close but we realized if we were to beat them we had to be consistent because we knew they had the strongest defense on the circuit,” Chirag said.
