PBL 2018 | Bengaluru Blasters beat Delhi Dashers to start their campaign on winning note

PBL 2018 | Bengaluru Blasters beat Delhi Dashers to start their campaign on winning note

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Bengaluru Blasters emerged victorious over Delhi Dashers, thanks to current World Champion Victor Axelsen who helped the team kick-start their Premier Badminton League campaign on a positive note. Bengaluru registered a 5-2 win over Delhi team at the Siri Fort Sports Complex in Delhi on Thursday.

The Bangalore-based franchise managed to win their mixed doubles, men’s singles (2), and men’s doubles encounter including the trump match of the day. While Axelsen won the men’s singles match for Bengaluru, Sung Ji Hyun managed to win only women’s singles match for Delhi which was their trump game and earned them two points.

Bengaluru successfully earned an early 1-0 lead in their first match of the season with the help of the mixed doubles pair of N.Sikki Reddy and South Korean Kim Sa Rang who beat Vladimir Ivanov and Ashwini Ponnappa 15-10, 12-15, 15-11. The Delhi pair of Ashwini and Ivanov started well taking an 8-6 lead at the break in the opening game but soon Bengaluru duo came from behind to win it. Despite trailing 7-8 at the break in the second game, Ashwini and her Russian partner upped the ante to take the encounter to the decider. Sikki and her partner got an early lead of 4-1 and raced to 8-5 and didn’t give any chance to Delhi pair to make a come back in the game and won the affair comfortably.

The visitors then doubled their lead thanks to World No.45 Malaysian Chong Wei Feng who stunned World No.15 Hong Kong's Wong Wing Ki Vincent 10-15, 15-13, 15-8 in the men's singles tie. After trailing by 0-2, Delhi had their hopes pinned on World No.6 Sung Ji-Hyun who came to play Delhi’s trump match and the South Korean player didn’t disappoint her team as she responded with a win over Scotland's Kirsty Gilmour 15-10, 8-15, 15-5 in the women's singles encounter.

But the fourth match of the day came as a decider for the teams which was played between Bangalore’s Axelsen and Delhi’s Tian Houwei. Axelsen, in the trump match for his team, cruised to an 8-6 lead at the break in the opening game and soon comfortably grabbed it 15-11. The Dane continued his dominance in the second game against Tian to race to an 8-4 lead again and sealed the game in his favour by a margin of 15-11.

In the fifth clash, Bengaluru’s men's doubles pair of Mathias Boe and Kim Sa Rang beat Russian pair of Vladimir Ivanov and Ivan Sozonov 15-9, 15-12 in straight games to made the result 5-2 at the end of the day.

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