French Open: PV Sindhu, Treesa-Gayatri reach quarters; Kidambi loses

Ace Indian shuttler PV Sindhu produced another impressive show as she rallied to a three-game win over USA's Beiwen Zhang to advance to the women's singles quarterfinals but it was curtains for Kidambi Srikanth at the French Open Super 750 badminton tournament here on Thursday.

Playing her first BWF tour event since returning from a knee injury, Sindhu, a two-time Olympic medallist, battled her way from an opening-game reversal to outgun World No. 10 Zhang 13-21 21-10 21-14 to enter her first quarterfinal of the season.

Sindhu didn't have a good start and made quite a handful of misjudgments on the sidelines as Beiwen controlled the drift extraordinarily well and took the first game.

In the second game, she shifted her focus on attacking more and took the initiative to win the points which Beiwen couldn't respond well and dropped the second game.

Sindhu kept things simple in the decider to slow down the attack and frustrated Beiwen, who then lost comfortably in the end.

The world No.11 will face either Olympic champion and second seed Chen Yu Fei of China or Denmark's Line Christophersen, making the contest an acid test for the Indian, who is eyeing a third medal at the Paris Games.

In men's singles, Srikanth, who showed his mastery over Chinese Taipei's Chou Tien Chen on Wednesday, once again hit a roadblock, this time against Guang Zu to suffer yet another round-of-16 loss, something which will bother him as he held a flawless 5-0 record against the Chinese ahead of the match.

The former world No.1 lost 21-19 12-21 20-22 to the world No. 17 Chinese after battling for 78 minutes.

Meanwhile, a brilliant game from Lakshya Sen who displayed his old self today and came back from a game down to take down third seed Li Shi Feng (16-21, 21-15, 21-13 ) of China to reach quarters.

Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand continued their good form and took a comfortable win (21-18, 21-13) over world no.7, pairing of Yuki Fukushima and Sayaka Hirota of Japan in a women's doubles Pre-quarterfinals clash.

Sayaka who has been suffering from a Knee injury for a long time could not return the high returns of the Indian pair. This helped the Indian pair register an easy win.

They will have a tough task in the quarterfinal clash against world no.1 Chinese pair of Chen Qing Chen and Jia Yifan tomorrow.

Indian men's doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty defeated (21-13, 21-12) Man Wei Chong and Kai Wun Tee of Malaysia in straight games.