ALL ENGLAND 2010 Round 1 – Paaske/Rasmussen prevail in battle of the veterans

Lars Paaske and Jonas Rasmussen dumped top seeds and world number 1 pairing Koo and Tan out of the 100th All England’s this afternoon to advance to a second round meeting with Korean pair Ko Sung Hyun and Yoo Yeon Seong.

By Mark Phelan (Live in Birmingham) Photos: BadmintonPhoto.com (Live)

The Danes showed some of their legendary form today, in what many classed as an unexpected victory, as they comfortably sent the Malaysians packing. Koo and Tan, winners of this year’s Malaysian Open Super Series, never settled in the match and before long the Danes had wrapped up the first set 21-13. The second set proved to be even more of a Malaysian mystery as Paaske and Rasmussen (pictured) led from start to finish before eventually closing out the match with a 21-11 win. The Danes dominance was borne out by the fact that the Malaysians only ever led once in the entire match and that was the very first point in the first set. While Koo and Tan certainly underperformed on the biggest stage of all most of the credit must got to Paaske and Rasmussen who played some of their best badminton in years to advance to round 2.

“We have worked very hard in training over the past while and I think it showed in our play today. It is always a special feeling to beat the worlds number 1 too but we will not get carried away either. We now purely focus on the game tomorrow against the young forward rushing Koreans and to win that we will have to be even more focused than we were today,” said Rasmussen after his victory.

It was a bad day for the remaining Danish men’s doubles pairs as both Skovgaard/Elbjorn and Kolding/Conrad both failed to advance past the first round.

Juliane Schenk (pictured) of Germany continued her good run of form in beating number 5 seed Pi Hongyan of France. The German, who was beaten finalist at last week’s German Open, lost a tight opening set 23-21 after letting one set point drift by but re-focused and slipped into top gear to eventually see off the challenge of the European number 1 with  21-12 21-15 victories in the second and deciding rubber.

In the men’s singles, Chen Jin took three long sets to beat Indonesia’s Rumbaka. The Chinese number three seed took an hour to book his second round berth with a 22-20 win in the third after Rumbaka let a match point slip.

Taufik Hidayat also took three sets to advance and put his lacklustre form down to playing so early in the morning (see video interview HERE). Denmark had a reasonable day on the men’s singles front with both Gade and Persson  (see video interview HERE)advancing but an out of sorts Jan O Jorgensen failed to turn up mentally today and folded under the pressure from Chen Long of China.

The home nation had a reasonable day on court with Rajiv Ouseph beating French qualifier Matthieu Lo Ying Ping, while Clark and Robertson showed some good form in beating Bach and Gunawan in 2 straight sets. In a thrilling centre court match Jenny Wallwork and Gabby White (pictured) had the crowd on the edge of their seats and drew the biggest cheer of the day as they beat Jang Ye Na and Yoo Hyun Young of Korea in 3 sets.

For all results click HERE

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