German Open: Treesa/Gayatri moves to quarter-finals, Aakarshi knocked out

Indian women's doubles pair Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand moved to the quarterfinals of the German Open Super 300 badminton tournament on Thursday.

While Treesa/Gayatri moved to the quarterfinals, India's challenge ended in men's singles and women's singles as Sathish Kumar Karunakaran and Aakarshi Kashyap lost their matches respectively.

Fourth-seeded Treesa/Gayatri registered a straight games win over qualifiers Sona Horinkova and Katerina Zuzakova of the Czech Republic.

In the first game, the Czech duo started well with the score tied at 5-5 but the Indian pair started dominating and won the first game 21-10. The second followed a similar script as the Indian pair raced away to win the match after being tied at 5-5.

In the women's singles, Aakarshi Kashyap lost in straight games to sixth seed Mia Blichfeldt of Denmark while in the men's singles Sathish Kumar Karunakaran lost 18-21, 22-24 to Nhat Nguyen of Ireland.

Sathish showed some resilience against a higher-ranked opponent and almost forced a decider but Nhat Nguyen kept his calm to win and move to the quarter-finals.

Big Indian names such as HS Prannoy, Lakshya Sen, PV Sindhu, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, and Chirag Shetty gave the German Open a miss after the Badminton Asia Team championships.

They are likely to return for the other tournaments of the European tour.