India’s Joshna Chinappa contrary to her known play of ups and downs this year so far continued her good form and reached the quarterfinal in the women’s competition at the Australian Open Squash tournament, in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday the 6 August 2015 by winning against Megan Craig of New Zealand. But it was curtains for her male compatriots Harinder Singh and Mahesh Mangaonkar.
Joshna lost her first game tamely at 5-11, seeded sixth hardly broke the sweat to get the better of 12th seed Megan Craig of New Zealand in subsequent three games at 11-6 11- 6 11-8. She awaits a tough test in her next match as she takes on top seed Annie Au of Hong Kong. Playing at the same venue where she had won the Victorian Open, the sixth seeded Chinappa made short work of Estonian Alexia Clonda in straight games in the second round. Sachika Ingale the other Indian girls on the other hand found it tough against the South African seeded player Siyoli Waters.
It was a disappointing day in Men’s section as sixth seeded Mahesh lost to Steve Finitsis of Australia having won first two games handsomely at 11-7, 11-4 in the next three games of the set 9-11, 9-11, 7-11 raising finger again at the stamina of Indian players. Harinder started losing the first game at 4-11 against Nafizwan Adnan and came back in second game with a score of 11-7 but lost the third game again poorly at 4-11. He did fight back in the fourth game of the set to take it at 15-13 but narrowly lost the decider game at 9-11 thus was shown the door by Malaysian.
In the earlier round Sandhu dropped one game enroute to his win over wild card entrant Joshua Larkin of Australia. The sixth seeded Mangaonkar too had a game grabbed away by Rhys Dowling of Australia before racing to a win. However Kush Kumar, who had to come via the qualifiers path, started well but dropped off soon after to Rex Hedrick, the eighth seed from Australia.