(by Steve Hopkins, photo ITTFWorld)
The top two seeds reached the Final at the WTT Star Contender series event in Astana, Kazakhstan. Those two Finalists, top seeded Alexis Lebrun and second seeded Dang Qiu may have been exhausted as the momentum shifts led to a series of one-sided scores. Lebrun won the opening game with relative ease at 11-6. Qiu won the second by even a larger margin of 11-5. The next blow was by Lebrun again – an 11-5 win to give Lebrun a 2-1 advantage. From that point forward, it was all Qiu – winning 11-6, 11-6, and 11-4 for the 4-2 win.
USA’s Kanak Jha reached the Quarters with wins over Darius Movileanu and Dmitrii Vinogradov. Jha’s 2-3 loss to Qiu was tight – tight enough that he was up 2 games to 0 and tied 9-9 in the third before Qiu’s comeback. That loss by Jha was the closest match that Qiu played, joining Alexis Lebrun as the only two players to take 2 games from the eventual champion.
A few other notes regarding the rest of the draw. Japan’s 22 year old Ryoichi Yoshiyama logged two solid wins over Poret and Pucar before losing in the Quarters. Flavien Coton had a solid run to the Quarters before losing to 19 year old chopper Li Tianyang of China. Tianyang actually logged three upsets in a row – over Chen Junsong, Darko Jorgic, and Coton before losing to Qiu in the Semifinals.
The top two seeds each reached the Semifinals in Women’s Singles with Wang Yidi winning three matches (all 3-0) and Satsuki Odo spreading three lost games over her three wins. The surprise for Sunday was that both of those top seeds were upset. Odo fell to Miyuu Kihara 3-2 and Wang Yidi won the first two games but then suffered the upset 2-3 loss to Hitomi Sato. In the Final, it was World No. 25 Miyuu Kihara with another upset – topping Hitomi Sato (World No. 13). The two were evenly matched from the beginning with Kihara winning the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 7th games for the 4-3 win..
The next tour stop is the China Smash which starts on October 1.
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