Sudirman Cup 2017: India's gritty campaign ends after 3-0 loss to China in quarter-final

Australia: India’s campaign at the Sudirman Cup ended after they went down 0-3 against top seed and 10-time champions China in the quarterfinals of the mixed team championship on Friday. It was always going to be an uphill task for the ninth-seeded Indian team to breach the Chinese wall and though the mixed doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy put up a gritty show to challenge the World No. 2 pair of Lu Kai and Huang Yaqiong, they ultimately went down. [caption id=“attachment_3484331” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty in action against China on Friday. Twitter: @BAI_Media[/caption] The experienced Chinese combination had the last laugh as they beat Ashwini and Satwiksairaj 16-21 21-13 21-16 in the first match that lasted an hour and three minutes. Kidambi Srikanth was then handed the enormous task of taming the Olympic champion Chen Long. In the 48-minute men’s singles match, Srikanth showed some spark but never really came close to threatening the supremacy of the Chinese. In the end, it was a 16-21 17-21 defeat against Long that saw India slip to a 0-2 deficit in the five-match rubber. Young pair of Satwiksairaj and Chirag Shetty then faced Fu Haifeng and Zhang Nan in the mixed doubles match and capitulated 9-21 11-21 within half an hour as China registered a 3-0 win over India. The next two matches – singles, which PV Sindhu was suppose to play, and women’s doubles – became inconsequential. India had qualified for the knockout stage only once in 2011 but even then it was the Chinese who had ended their campaign with a 3-1 win. China, which lost only one of their 10 matches in the round-robin stage, dished out another superb performance to outwit the Indian shuttlers and will face the winner of the other quarterfinal between Japan and Malaysia.