Asian Games 2018: Pallikal, Chinappa, Ghosal win bronze in squash

Indian squash players Dipika Pallikal settled for a bronze medal in the women’s singles category after she went down to Malaysian defending champion Nicol Ann David in the semi-final match on Saturday.

She was joined by Sourav Ghosal and Joshna Chinappa who too lost their semi-final matches and had to stay content with bronze medals in their respective categories. Pallikal suffered a straight games defeat to favourite David 3-0, (7-11, 9-11, and 6-11), despite putting up a brave fight. Earlier, the 26-year old Indian had outplayed Kobayashi Misaki of Japan in straight sets to make it to the quarter-finals on Friday. But the four-time Asian Games champion could not emulate her success against Ann David. This was the second time that Dipika won a bronze medal after she had clinched the same prize four years ago in Incheon after losing to the same opponent in David.

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“She is experienced and knows how to handle every situation, thrown at her. She was world number one for 10 years for a reason. I am happy I played well. It’s unfortunate that I was in top-half to play with Nicol,” Said Dipika as quoted by The Quint.

But she added that this defeat was needed to be put behind as they have an opportunity to bag the top prize in the women’s team event.

“We have a gold to achieve in the team event. you can’t think much about what has happened in the singles. It’s hard to regroup and come back but we have to do it. We don’t want to celebrate as yet, we have a bigger target to achieve,” added Pallikal, as quoted by the same source.

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Chinappa found it hard to get past her opponent in the form of the 19-year old Sivasangari Subramaniam from Malaysia as she eventually lost 1-3 ( 10-12, 6-11, 11-9, 7-11)

In men’s play, Sourav Ghoshal went down fighting to Hong Kong’s Chung Ming Au 2-3 (12-10, 13-11, 6-11, 6-11, 6-11) in the semi-final. Ghoshal, who had won the silver medal at the 2014 Games had an early advantage of 2-0 but could not capitalise on it, as his opponent won three games with the same results (11-6)  to seal a win for himself.