INDONESIA OPEN 2018 Day 1 – Singles seeds advance to Round 2

Indonesia lost both of its number two singles players as many of the seeds advanced on Tuesday at the Indonesia Open.

Story: Sulistianing Ambarwati, Badzine Correspondent live in Jakarta
Photos: Yves Lacroix / Badmintonphoto (live)

The 2018 Indonesia Open in Istora Senayan, Jakarta started its first round on Tuesday, July 3rd. Even though the event has just started, many of the matches in the first round featured incredible talent, some looking more like a final match.

Playing on court one, second-seeded Akane Yamaguchi played very well against Thailand’s, Nitchaon Jindapol.  Yamaguchi won the match in 43 minutes.

Yamaguchi said that she was happy to win the match because Jindapol made a lot of mistakes, but she would give the best in every performance of this tournament: “Of course, I want to be the champion of this tournament, but now what I think is I should give my best in every match. Moreover, in Indonesia Open 2018, there are a lot of great shuttlers, so I just need to do best performance.”

This 156-cm player thought that Indonesian supporters did affect her concentration when there were Indonesian shuttlers playing on adjacent courts, but she knew that they were so energetic and gave the players spirit to play the match.

Indonesia’s top-ranked player in women’s singles, Gregoria Mariska, advanced to the second round but world #41 Fitriani (pictured above) had the misfortuned of facing Thailand’s Ratchanok Intanon and went down tamely.

Moving on to the match between the top-seeded men’s singles player, Viktor Axelsen had to work hard in his second game against Indonesia’s #2 Jonatan Christie (pictured).  All Indonesian supporters supported Jonatan a lot by shouting and yelling, yet Axelsen kept doing his best during the match.

At the beginning of the match, Jonatan did not do any attack to Axelsen but in the second game, Axelsen had to defend smashes and attacks from Jonatan until finally the Dane won it 21-19.

Jonatan said that Axelsen did very well on the match because he used the strategy very well and kept him from developing his own performance on court: “In the second game, I did better to attack his performance, but I still could not maximize my performance to beat Axelsen and I have to acknowledge that he is very good that is why he is now the #1 men’s singles badminton player in the world.”

Click here for complete Tuesday results